Discourse Markers (DMs) in Turkish as a Foreign Language Coursebooks: A Corpus Driven Approach
Aydın tömer dil dergisi, cilt.11, sa.2, ss.355-383, 2026 (TRDizin)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 11 Sayı: 2
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Dergi Adı: Aydın tömer dil dergisi
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: TR DİZİN (ULAKBİM)
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.355-383
- Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
- Ondokuz Mayıs Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
This study examines the representation of discourse markers (DMs) in Turkish as a Foreign Language (TFL) coursebooks, comparing their distribution with spoken Turkish as documented in the Turkish National Corpus (TNC) (Spoken). The analysis focuses on two widely used coursebook series, Yeni Hitit (levels 1-3) and Yediiklim Türkçe (A1-C2), examining dialogue-based and interactional sections. The most frequent DMs identified in the TNC were manually analyzed and quantified in the coursebooks. Normalized frequency values per million words were calculated, and the data were compared through statistical and visual analyses, including ratio comparisons and corpus-based benchmarks. The findings reveal that discourse markers are consistently underrepresented and unevenly distributed across both series, particularly those central to interactional fluency and pragmatic use. Core markers such as yani, şey, and işte occur at substantially lower frequencies than in spoken Turkish, indicating a gap between pedagogical input and authentic language use. These results support previous research suggesting that language teaching materials tend to prioritize structural aspects of language over discourse-level competence.