A Corpus-based Lexical Study On Texts In The Mariner’s Handbook

As one of the most important and authoritative reference books for the seafarers, The Mariner s Handbook has the instructive significance for safe navigation. However, there have been no related studies on this book, especially from the perspective of English for Specific Purposes. This thesis makes a comprehensive lexical study on The Mariner’s Handbook, and attempts to investigate whether cadets of CET-4 level have an adequate reading comprehension of this book, and to give some implications to the second language learner’s vocabulary acquisition and compilation of Maritime English textbooks for the cadets in maritime universities.This thesis is a corpus-based study adopting both quantitative and qualitative analysis approaches. In comparison with COLEN corpus and CET-4 word list, texts in the book were analyzed from perspectives of lexical density, lexical coverage, high frequency words, hapax legomena and keywords. Through a comprehensive analysis, it is found that the CET-4 words are essential to understand this book, but not sufficient for cadets of CET-4 level to have a good comprehension. They need to acquire more technical terms and some abbreviations and acronyms about Maritime English. The pedagogical implications are that the acquisition of such words should be included in everyday teaching and learning and in the compilation process of Maritime English Textbooks for college students, efforts should be made to improve the inter-textual repetition rate of vocabulary for a better acquisition, and the research results can be considered as a reference in the future.