Abstract
In addition to the general English knowledge required for nearly any human occupation today, vocabulary competence has been especially focused on seeking to keep pace with boosting Englishes for Specific Purposes. Owing to the possibilities offered by contemporary software solutions, corpus linguistics has been able to answer some specific questions on the vocabulary demand of texts, as well as to provide concentrated vocabulary lists according to their frequency in real-life texts (corpora). Aiming to provide our target learners of English for marine engineering purposes with a practical vocabulary tool to help them reach an adequate reading comprehension text coverage of 95%, we developed a marine engineering word list of 337 word families, accompanied by a list of 73 transparent compounds, which were derived from the corpus of marine engineering instruction books with 1,769,821 running words. The list can be studied in university classes or training courses for seafarers, through various types of vocabulary exercises, but it might also assist in building technical glossaries and dictionaries. The methodology used and procedures applied in the paper should hopefully be of assistance to other authors and language instructors working on other areas of technical English.
Highlights
Certain traces of language examination conducted upon collections of written texts can be found even from the age of antiquity, the notion of corpus linguistics in the modern sense has been related to the appearance of electronic corpora and other computing resources beginning in the 1970s (Nation 2016)
Bearing in mind the fact that English is learned in many countries from an early age, we deemed that it would be reasonable to expect them to be competent in reading and understanding at least 3,000 basic English words (BNC/COCA), especially considering that it refers to the receptive knowledge and not necessarily productive language skills
Analysing the most practical language needs of our target language learners — in this case future and active marine engineers following English for Marine Engineering Purposes courses, we embarked on the ambitious project of collecting, selecting and analysing their key corpus of marine engineering instruction books in terms of both vocabulary types and the overall lexical burden
Summary
Certain traces of language examination conducted upon collections of written texts can be found even from the age of antiquity, the notion of corpus linguistics in the modern sense has been related to the appearance of electronic corpora and other computing resources beginning in the 1970s (Nation 2016). The accelerated rise and application of this type of linguistic research has overlapped with the boosting of lexicography, all as a consequence of renewed interest in vocabulary and the new possibilities afforded by information technologies. The overall impact on language teachers has been two-fold. The more and more technical and demanding areas of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), accompanied by the massive development of information technologies, have imposed significant new challenges in terms of teacher competencies and course design. New areas of research and methodologies have offered enormous opportunities in terms of the detailed computational analysis of abundant authentic material, as well as the testing and comparison of the obtained results, leading to more effective and learner-oriented language course material
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