The Role Of Native Language In Maritime English Teaching

China's present-time maritime education takes the form of a combination of higher and secondary institutions, which intends to satisfy the requirements of both the national educational departments and those mandatory requirements of the STCW78/95 Conventions. Upon graduation, most maritime graduates will be engaged in the international shipping industry, in which, the bachelors will aim at the management level while the diploma holders tend to take up the operation level. Both are thus featured in their language communication and reading practicality. But unfortunately a large part of the graduates cannot use the target language at their will.With the development of the international shipping industry and especially after China's entry to WTO, the English language is seeing an extensive use in this area. As a main exporter of seafarers, China is not in a favorable position in the competition. Language communication is the major problem. It is necessary to use bilingual teaching in maritime education to reinforce the English language teaching, to increase the students'language ability and to improve the situation. To meet the requirements of the labor markets home and abroad and to strengthen the maritime majors'language ability, Qingdao Ocean Shipping Mariners College began its experiment of bilingual teaching in 2007 and its teachers conducted researches during the process. As one of the participants in this experiment, the author takes an active role in the study and practice and the experiment achieved good effect. It is therefore the author's wish to perform analysis on the due respect which will hopefully shed light on the maritime bilingual instruction.The subjects of this research are from Qingdao Ocean Shipping Mariners College, whose major is Marine English, studying in Grade Two. The data is their scores of the second term in Grade One and the first term in Grade Two, all of which are input into the computer and analyzed by SPSS12.0. The results show that most of the students prefer the bilingual teaching in the present class, whether for the sake of individual or social development; the teaching model, that is English accounting for 70% and Chinese 30%, is successful. As the students have a relatively weak basis of English plus the characteristics of Marine English, it is necessary to adopt Chinese as a complementary tool to assist Marine English teaching, and the improved marks of the students of different periods are the evidence of its achievement.