Development of the 2nd-grade Maritime Examination Word List: Essential Maritime Vocabulary for Reading and Translating English Texts in the 2nd-grade Maritime Examination

Abstract

Translation tasks in the English examination for the 2nd-grade maritime officers' certificate(navigation) are challenging for Japanese maritime students because they have insufficient knowledge of the vocabulary used therein. To address this issue, we created a word list based on a corpus compiled from 56 texts used in past examinations, employing the integrated values of both frequency and range (Ishikawa, 2018) as selection and arrangement criteria. During this process, a set of words in New JACET 8000 that are widely used in Japanese junior high school English textbooks; maritime loan words; and words with low frequency, narrow range, or low learning value were excluded. The final 278 words (the 2nd-grade Maritime Examination Word List) cover more than 25% of the corpus. If students have learned the 278 words, they can fully understand the texts and avoid referring to their dictionaries frequently, allowing them to focus on text comprehension and translation tasks. The coverage of the final list in the corpus is higher than that of two existing maritime word lists. To accurately test the usefulness of this list, clearer standards for comparing multiple word lists must be established.