The Real-life-based School Dictionary for Turkish

Abstract

This report aims to describe the development of a new, original, and monolingual dictionary as an educational resource named the Real-life-based School Dictionary (RLBSD). There is a general lack of corpus-based school dictionaries in the Turkish context. The existing dictionaries are based on native speaker intuitions and are far from being empirical, indicating the need for the development of a corpus-based dictionary. In this respect, the RLBSD meets this critical need. A specialized corpus consisting of texts from a range of natural language environments such as coursebooks (from primary to high school) approved by the Ministry of Education (MoNE), children's literature books, and periodicals was compiled and forms the basis of the RLBSD. The dictionary has been designed with the use of information technologies and corpus linguistics methods and is accessible to users on all digital platforms (the Internet, smart board, tablet, smartphone) as an instructional tool. It is believed that the current study may serve as an exemplary work with its methods and outputs for Turkish lexicography studies.