A Corpus-based Study On The Lexical Features Of GMDSS English Examination

Lewis Michael(1993)makes a lexical analysis which argues that vocabulary is the basis of language and that the study of lexical coverage is very important in second language acquisition and teaching.Maritime College English(hereinafter refer to as MCE)is the first specifically designed college English textbooks for navigation students.GMDSS examination(hereinafter refer to as GE)is a national examination required by the Department of Transportation.At present Chinese shipping companies require that applicants hold relevant certificates.So this test is very important to those students majoring in navigation.This thesis,based on the study of vocabulary,mainly focuses on the lexical coverage of MCE over GE and hopes to make contribution to the teaching of vocabulary and help the students pass GMDSS examination.There are two self-established corpora in this thesis,MCE corpus and GE corpus.Meanwhile,we use the JDEST corpus to carry on the comparative analysis.Quantitative and qualitative analysis methods are adopted in the process of this thesis to test whether MCE corpus can meet the need that navigational students can pass GE or not.The research results indicate that neither lexical coverage nor single lexical coverage over GE can reach 95%and can not provide those students an adequate reading comprehension(Laufer,1989).To solve this problem,we build a supplementary wordlist which can make the coverage rate increase to 95.1%.This paper also studies lexical density,lexical features,and lexical length in GE corpus to study the characteristics of the vocabulary of GMDSS English test.It is to provide some suggestions for compiling teaching materials and make further vocabulary research of GE.