A Corpus-based Lexical Study of Maritime Navigational English Materials

• Main Authors: Chi-Tang Sun, 孫啟棠
• Other Authors: Huiling Lang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/71727477905293368450

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用英語學系碩士班 === 98 === Maritime Navigational English, a branch of Maritime English, is a specialized sub-language that navigational watch and deck-cadet officers make use of when performing navigation, communication, safety and maintenance tasks onboard. It is essential for the officers to use Maritime Navigational English correctly and efficiently when communicating with port controls or other ships as it influences sea safety (Loginovsky, 2002). In Taiwan, it is Merchant Marines students as well as students of other related Navigational disciplines that are obliged to learn Maritime Navigational English as part of their pre-service training. Much specialized material has been thus developed for the course while a course model was established by an authority (International Shipping Federation of London, 2000). Nevertheless, the course model has failed to provide useful lexis lists for Maritime Navigational English courses, leaving an EFL English teacher with limited navigational knowledge at loss when selecting items to teach to students. A corpus derived from four Maritime Navigational English materials was then complied to create useful lexical lists. It contains 163,692 tokens or 9,536 types.Through strict application of word selection criteria and meticulous corpus design, the researcher was able to identify 1,103 the most common words (17.7%), 119 technical words (1.35%), 139 keywords, 214 the most common concgrams and 24 technical concgrams. A minimum vocabulary threshold of 1,222 types, including the most common words and technical words is suggested for a Maritime Navigational English student. But for comprehension of the materials, one needs a vocabulary of at least 3,930 word families. As for the features of Maritime Navigational English lexis, it was found that the majority of technical words were either acronyms or compounds while 3-word concgram and complex noun phrases were the two pervasive characteristics of the most common and technical concgrams. Finally with this result, the researcher hopes to elucidate on the nature of Maritime Navigational English lexis and to provide ready-to-use lexical lists for the teachers, learners and material developers of Maritime Navigational English courses.