| This study mainly made a comparison between College English corpus (MCE) and Nautical English corpus (NE) by corpus-based approach to investigate whether MCE corpus have smoothly continuity to nautical English and whether the navigation major textbooks of English edition are suitable for navigation students’English competence by answering following sub-questions:(1) What are the lexical features of MCE corpus and NE corpus in terms of lexical density, word length, word frequency?(2) How about the vocabulary difficulties of MCE corpus and NE corpus?(3) What is the lexical coverage rate of MCE corpus over NE corpus;The corpora used in this study, MCE corpus and NE corpus, were built through collecting the textbooks of Maritime College English and textbooks of Navigation major in English edition respectively. The Wordsmith software, RANGE software and Perl computer language were adapted to process the text in a quantitative manner.The results of the study find that the lexical density of NE corpus is small than lexical density of MCE corpus, but lexical difficulty and word length of NE corpus are apparently larger than those of NE corpus. Additionally, lexical coverage rate of MCE wordlist over NE corpus is 91% but less than 95% which means MCE textbooks have better continuity to nautical English but still have room for improvement.Based on the results of the study, the author proposed that teachers should emphasize the learning of hapax of nautical English in the process of teaching. As for the textbooks, like Marine Navigation, whose lexical difficulty are out of the English competence of navigation students, they should be supplemented by related Chinese materials in order to have a better comprehension and then be modified appropriately according to the teaching effect. At last, by calculation and selection, the author made a supplemental wordlist for MCE textbook to improve the lexical coverage of MCE over NE corpus, so as to lay a more solid foundation for navigation students. |
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