How much and what kind of vocabulary do marine engineers need for adequate comprehension of ship instruction books and manuals?

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.

Lexical Analysis of Nautical and Marine Engineering Corpora: Similar or Different Lexicographic Results

“…In the case of marine engineers, communication rests on intra-ship communicative activities and deck-engine speech activities (De Castro 2020). However, further caution is required here since different findings have emerged from previous research conducted on Marine Engineering publications and vocabulary (Bocanegra-Valle 2013;Hsu 2014;Đurović et al 2021), which all point to Marine Engineering technical publications being the most demanding ones. For example, in Marine Engineering instruction books, over a fifth (20.5%) of the vocabulary was "unknown", i.e.…”

Frequency or Keyness?

“…Keyness, on the other hand, aims to detect the key vocabulary for a specific area by comparing its vocabulary frequencies with those in a reference GE corpus. The two methods are tested and discussed with reference to a professional corpus of marine engineering instruction books, with English for Marine Engineering Purposes (EMEP) generally considered extremely demanding, vocabulary-wise (Hsu 2014;Đurović et al 2021). Adding to this the globality of the seafaring profession and the fact that English is the official means of communication of this complex discourse community, as formally established after World War II, technical vocabulary has been a mandatory requirement, but also a major challenge, for non-native speakers of English, as well as for language instructors.…”