JAPANESE IT VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE OF VIETNAMESE INTERMEDIATE LEARNERS

Abstract

In tandem with its increasing development, information technology (IT) vocabulary has become more and more popular, which requires to be updated in Japanese courses on IT being offered at various colleges in the country. It is important that these courses are designed with practical content to deliver their intended outcomes and meet social demands. This necessitates a study to see how good the learners’ knowledge of IT specific vocabulary is and which IT terms they have properly acquired. To that end, this study was conducted with Vietnamese learners of Japanese at intermediate level. It was found that (i) the respondents have secured a basic understanding of popular IT terms, e.g. internet, mail; (ii) regarding basic discipline-specific terms, a generally low level of knowledge is apparent; (iii) substantial discrepancy exists in their understanding of word pairs containing abbreviations; (iv) a number of IT terms are adequately understood but their Vietnamese equivalents are explanations rather than proper Vietnamese IT terms; (v) one reason for the errors in IT vocabulary is learners tend to make inferences from the primary sense of the terms. The study can be a good reference when designing syllabi for Japanese IT courses at college.