The potential of using corpus-based technologies for incidental vocabulary learning of General Maritime English

Introduction. The article addresses the problem of expanding the potential vocabulary of cadets of maritime educational institutions in the process of listening comprehension determined by the need to develop strategies for independent vocabulary acquisition necessary for autonomous learning of maritime English. The purpose of this article is to justify the application of corpus technologies for the selection of vocabulary items, which will allow students to master the strategies required to expand vocabulary in the process of autonomous listening, and increase the efficiency of learning and teaching maritime English. Materials and Methods. The study follows the two-level Maritime English learning model incorporating General Maritime English and Specialized Maritime English. The first component focuses on the linguistic content embedded in the generalized maritime context and prioritizes the lexical and cognitive approaches highlighting the necessity of their integration and emphasizing corpus tools the application of which is helpful in topic-related vocabulary selection through instructional, linguistic and statistic principles on the basis of authentic texts. Results. The article describes the preliminary stage of potential vocabulary acquisition by junior cadets through listening comprehension and proposes the procedure of text selection for context-specific raw corpus design and thematic word list generation. Through the computer processing of the wordlist and the analysis of the concordance lines, the independent vocabulary learning strategies were identified and ranked. The conclusion was drawn about the correlations between the basic word learning potential and the number of independent word learning strategies applied. Conclusions. The findings of the research add to the understanding of the potential of corpusbased technologies for the topical vocabulary selection and analysis in order to develop cadets’ independent word learning strategies that are significant for potential vocabulary acquisition through listening comprehension. The results achieved suggest that the word lists generated from the subject corpus should be integrated into the basic vocabulary of General Maritime English, which should be mastered under the teacher’s guidance.