Abstract
Considering the importance of adequate understanding of instruction books and manuals on board vessels all over the world, as well as the challenges it imposes to the English language teachers and course designers, this paper aims to answer important research questions in relation to the quantity and type of vocabulary required for their adequate reading comprehension. In this study we use the method of Lexical Frequency Profiling and the software developed by Anthony Laurence – AntWordProfiler 1.4.0w. The corpus is comprised of 1,769,821 running words obtained from instruction books and manuals of various ship and machinery types. The results of this study point to the high technicality and lexical demand of the corpus, which calls for a highly technical English courses’ design and further research in marine engineering (English) vocabulary. Additionally, the research findings point to the need of creating a marine engineering-specific word list.
Highlights
How much highfrequency general-purpose and academic vocabulary is used in marine engineering instruction books and manuals? 7.2
By analysing the finalised corpus against the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL), we obtained the results regarding the frequency of general-service and academic words in the Corpus of Ship Instruction Books and Manuals – corpus of ship instruction books and manuals (CSIBM) (Table 1)
The coverage we found is substantial enough that we may conclude that learning the AWL during the studies or for the needs of a formal training after secondary education is useful for reading academic texts, such as textbooks, but that it will be useful in a future career of a marine engineer serving on board, which is an important pedagogical implication
Summary
Technical manuals are an essential part of shipboard equipment and are of vital importance to ship operators. In addition to more or less simple everyday conversation and dealing with uniform forms and documents, everyday job requirements of marine engineers include having to read and use numerous and rather demanding instruction books and manuals related to various ship’s systems, both in terms of technical knowledge and English vocabulary. This is of particular significance since instruction books are especially consulted in case of errors, failures, breakdowns or emergency, when consulting an instruction book or manual should be as quick and efficient as possible. As knowledge vocabulary is generally considered a strong predictor of reading comprehension, in this paper we set out to explore the lexical profile of this genre, with the goal to determine how much and what type of vocabulary prospective and practitioning marine engineers need for reading ship instruction books and manuals
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