A Conversation Analysis Of Nautical English

With the booming of the shipping industry, the international shipping is calling for competent advanced seafarers. STCW Convention Manila Amendments came into force in2012, setting a higher requirement for the competence of English for seafarers. However, low communicative competence has become a kind of obstacle hindering seafarers in China from labor exporting service to international market. The People’s Republic of China Seafarers’ Competency Examination and Certification Rules and The People’s Republic of Crew Competency Examination outline have also been revised and implemented in2012correspondingly to keep up with the new STCW’s requirements and direct the evaluation process organized by nautical Administration.To better guide crews’ training for the examination, further improve their competency level, and more importantly, to enhance their communication capability at work, this thesis is intended to analyze the nautical conversations with Conversation Analysis theories of Sacks et al. Previous achievements in this field at home and abroad are reviewed in respects of turn-taking system,adjacency pair and opening and closing system, after which the theoretical framework is established in accordance with the theories.The analysis will base on the authoritative training materials:English Listening and Speaking of Marine Engineering (Operational Level) and English Listening and Speaking of Navigation (Second/Third Mate). Conversations are collected from the two books and are transcribed to a38000-word corpus for analysis. Qualitative research and quantitative research will be combined to guarantee the accuracy and credibility of this thesis.The data analysis is divided into three parts:turn-taking system, adjacency pair and opening and closing system. In the first place, turn-taking system is further divided into turn-constitutional unit and turn-allocational unit for analysis. Characteristics of turn-taking in the corpus are investigated to see if they are in accordance with the rules. Turn-constitutional unit includes word, phrase, clause and sentence. Turn-allocational unit is further divided into two aspects:current speaker selects the next speaker; next speaker self-select. Then different types of adjacency pair are classified and discussed to find out the disciplines in them. And preference organization is explored from the aspects of preferred organization and dispreferred organization. The last but not the least, opening and closing system in the interviews are studied to see its comparison and contrast with mundane conversations.In the very end, conclusions are arrived as a summary for the whole thesis. The characteristics show that nautical conversations are designed for the purpose of order or inquiry and this purpose are achieved through various units, such as turn, adjacency pair opening and closing. In these respects, nautical conversations show different characteristics from mundane conversations.