Innovation in Language Learning

It is highly important to understand terms to succeed in Higher Education as they are used to refer a particular thing in a technical or scientific object, especially in engineering. The terms especially originated from foreign languages such as English and French are more prevalent among the fields of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering in Turkey. However, major of those terms has a synonym in the Turkish language related to those fields and also they have been commonly used.   This results in multilingualism in engineering, medicine and other disciplines at least in terms of the utilisation of terms. It is therefore common that the number of academic studies regarding the impacts of foreign originated terms on the Turkish language is ever increasing. Nowadays, the academic studies point out that the use of foreign originated terms impairs the Turkish language in terms of various aspects such as vowel harmony, spelling and utterance. Additionally, these issues aggravate the process of teaching and learning the Turkish language as a foreign language. 

The goal of this study to understand the impacts of multilingualism by measuring the prevalence of foreign originated terms (e.g. server) and their synonyms (e.g. sunucu) using various search engines namely Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo, especially in the fields of Electric, Electronic and Computer Engineering. To achieve our objectives, the Foreign Word Equivalence Manual, which was made available by the Turkish Language Association, was used in the study. The number of foreign originated words and their equivalence were computed as 1948 and 2261 and categorised into 41 groups (e.g. medicine, astronomy & chemistry) because a specific term may have more than one equivalence in the Turkish language. Descriptive and inferential statistics were also computed to find out whether there is a significant difference among categories. Additionally, the findings of our study also compares the significant differences among search engines.