From Fragmentation to Coherence: Learner Perspectives on Textbook Design for Japanese Traditional Culture in Vietnamese Higher Education

Cultural content in foreign language programs is often plentiful, yet it does not readily organize itself into forms that support interpretation. This study explores how such fragmentation is experienced within a Japanese Traditional Culture course at Hanoi University, and what these reveals for the design of course materials. Rather than assessing existing materials, it approaches the issue through needs analysis, focusing on how advanced learners themselves construe the place of cultural knowledge within their academic and emerging professional orientations. Data were gathered from 64 third- and fourth-year students via a questionnaire combining closed and open-ended items. Descriptive analysis was used to trace response patterns, while qualitative data were examined inductively to capture how learners position themselves in relation to cultural content. The findings do not point to a lack of materials, but to a problem of coherence—one that gives rise to a clear demand for a course-specific textbook. What students seem to be seeking are forms of knowledge that hold together: structured rather than dispersed, conceptually grounded rather than loosely assembled, and connected to everyday practices rather than detached from them. In this context, terminology support, visual organization, and cross-cultural comparison are not supplementary features, but part of the conditions that allow cultural content to be made sense of. What emerges is less a problem of quantity than of arrangement. Materials become effective to the extent that they sustain coherence, make conceptual relations visible, and enable interpretive engagement. Structure, in this sense, is not incidental but constitutive of how cultural knowledge can be understood, particularly where engagement with the target culture remains indirect.