Cognitive, linguistic, and methodological considerations in teaching professional vocabulary to information technology (IT) students

Abstract

The article examines modern facets of English language teaching to IT students in Ukraine. A mixed-methods approach was taken for the research: a review of modern approaches to teaching professional vocabulary to IT students; assessment of the effectiveness of the various approaches; use of questionnaires to obtain information from students; and observation of teaching and the learning process by the authors. The authors emphasize the effectiveness of the cognitive approach to vocabulary acquisition, which implies consideration of the role of memory and the identification of mechanisms and models of vocabulary processing. Among these are the concept mediation model, which demonstrates that words in both languages are not related to each other but are associated only via a conceptual system, and the word-association model. The latter illustrates that the translation of a word includes the following cognitive processes: word recognition ® concept search ® target word search ® English equivalent search ® word pronunciation. The role of cognitive learning strategies has been generalized as well as the role of cognitive processes of vocabulary acquisition, i.e. mnemonic devices are emphasized. Data obtained both from student questionnaires and experimental outcomes prove the effectiveness of using the following mnemonic techniques for teaching English IT vocabulary: semantic grouping, phonological similarity grouping, words with similar initial letters grouping, abbreviations, similar structural elements within words, loci method, hanger words, and the Keyword method. The authors substantiate the necessity and importance of learning linguistic and methodological peculiarities of the English vocabulary of the sublanguage “Information Technology”. It is shown that the phenomenon of “linguistic interference”, both positive and negative, influences the process of foreign vocabulary acquisition, thus making the process either easier or more difficult. The main difficulty is caused by “interlanguage interference”, the negative effects of language rules and processes on the processes of the target language. A methodological typology of the IT vocabulary addressed has been developed, based on the typology of lexical linguistic correspondences from a comparative analysis of English and Ukrainian. These reflect complete, partial, or zero correlation of semantic and morphological structures, as well as the connection and pronunciation of words in the languages being compared. As a result, five vocabulary groups have been identified.