カタカナ語の対応を持つ医療用語の聴解力に関する調査

Abstract

University students in medical fields must learn a significant number of katakana words (English loanwords in this study) as technical vocabulary, and our previous study suggests that such katakana words can be used to aid learning English for reading. In the present study, we conducted listening tests to examine whether katakana words can also be useful for listening comprehension. The 64 participants studied 350 basic medical terms including ones with katakana counterparts for 10 weeks in Spring 2023. They were given listening pre- and post-tests on the meanings of 30 terms, which were categorized into three groups: 1) ones with katakana counterparts dominant in Japanese (e.g., ‘vaccine「’ ワクチン」), 2) ones with both Japanese equivalents and katakana counterparts with the former being pervasive (e.g., ‘stretcher’ 「担架・ストレッチャー」), and 3) ones without katakana counterparts (e.g., ‘palm’「手のひら」). The test results were compared with vocabulary tests from Fall 2021. The findings suggest that katakana words can be useful for understanding medical English words in both written and spoken forms, as they are already part of their vocabulary in Japanese.departmental bulletin pape