A Quantitative Analysis Of Vocabulary In Maritime College English Reading And Writing Textbooks

Maritime College English series textbooks are meant to fulfill the requirements of general College English teaching as well as to fill the gap between general English and maritime English by adding some maritime-related content. College English Curriculum Requirements (CECR hereinafter) formulated by the Department of Higher Education is the guidebook to compile College English textbooks. Wordlists recommended by the CECR is regarded as the core vocabulary in this thesis. Therefore, it is of great significance to research the lexical coverage of CECR over Maritime College English Reading and Writing (MCERW hereinafter), the coverage rate of CECR Phrases over MCERW corpus, core vocabulary repetition in MCERW corpus. With the assistance of Wordsmith Tools5.0and RANGE, two self-build corporal MCERW corpus and CECR corpus are analyzed from the perspective of lexical coverage, lexical repetition and occurrence rate of phrases, a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis approaches are adopted, with an intention to assess to what extent MCERW is in line with CECR three wordlists and its phrase list.According to the findings, the basic requirements words coverage rate over MCERW is90.3%, while intermediate requirements and higher requirements words coverage rates over MCERW corpus are43.58%and31.57%respectively, which indicate that MCERW fail to cover most of the core vocabulary. This should arouse the attention of teachers and textbook compilers. Based on the research data, three supplementary wordlists are provided. As for the repetition of core vocabulary, the number of words repeating at least5times is overwhelmingly larger than that of intermediate requirements and higher requirements. And the occurrence rate of CECR phrase list in MCERW corpus is about40.4%. Therefore, Brown is chosen as a reference corpus to make a supplementary phrase list. These findings are sure to provide some useful suggestions for Maritime English teaching as well as the revision of the MCERW textbooks.