Teaching Keywords and Their Collocational Profiles in Marine Engineering English: A Qualitative and Quantitative Approach

Resumen

This study describes a systematic approach to identify the essential vocabulary of marine engineering reference texts (handbooks, manuals) using ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves, 2009). The aim is to identify the most frequent words and word clusters (collocations and set phrases) in a 450,000- word corpus of authentic marine engineering documents (MARENGDOC), and then to categorize frequent noun and verb phrases for teaching purposes. This study applies a computer-mediated research methodology, concgramming, in order to determine how individual marine engineering keywords can help to reveal the features of marine engineering discourse, and to design more relevant teaching materials for students of marine engineering English. For practical purposes, this study covers the top 20 keywords and analyses them with specific attention to their main collocates.