The CET-4 Vocabulary Coverage In Marine Engineering English Texts

Nowadays lexical study plays a prominent role in the second language acquisition and teaching. Since the international shipping industry is undergoing fast development, the STCW95 has the English requirements for seafarers. Marine engineering English has aroused great attention. However, there is little research on the coverage of CET-4 words over MEE. This paper adopts the corpus-based method to make the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the CET-4 word coverage over a one-million-word marine engineering English corpus. The major research questions are the following:(1) The coverage rate of CET-4 words in MEE texts and in the four sub-corpora of MEE corpus.(2) The high frequency words in the MEE corpus.(3) Proposing a supplementary MEE word list.(4) Semantic features of MEE vocabulary.The results show that the coverage rates of the CET-4 words in MEE texts are normally distributed, and the mean coverage rate is 84%. The maximum coverage rate is 94.5%. and the minimum coverage rate is 66.5%. The coverage rates in the four sub-corpora are 82%. 85.1%. 82.3% and 82.7% respectively. The CET-4 vocabulary is essential to MEE reading comprehension, but far from enough to reach the 95 percent coverage. The supplementary MEE word list can increase the mean coverage rate to 95.6%. The pedagogical implication is that MEE words can be taught and studied in the same way as the CET-4 words.