Introduction
Despite an exponential increase of studies in individual English for Specific Purposes (ESP) areas, Maritime English (ME) as a member of the ESP family has been largely neglected by ESP researchers, thus remaining an area that needs to be brought to light for the sake of ME teachers and students alike. As researchers and teachers of ME, we have encountered many ESP students who had particular linguistic needs for the particular types of documentation and discourses that they will use in their potential communities of practice. Teaching those students, the biggest challenge was having proper course books that could meet their needs.
There are few ME course books commercially available in China and Korea. In most cases, individual Maritime English teachers come across their own course materials based on their own teaching as well as learning experiences, assuming the materials will provide what the student needs. Such a circumstance gives a big burden on teachers especially who never taught ESP courses before, so-called general English teachers (
Sullivan & Girginer, 2002). To put it in perspective, course books and materials are not openly discussed, thus raising questions, such as how much and how well the course book reflects students’ needs as well as their potential communities of practice.
In this context, the present paper aims to examine English textbooks used for Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) operators in China and Korea. More precisely, it investigates lexico-grammatical patterns of phrases in VTS textbooks, in comparison with those in the Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP).
Developed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) sub-committee on Safety of Navigation, the SMCP is a collection of standardized English phrases for navigational and safety communications from ship to ship, ship to shore and vice versa, and on board ships. It was compiled “to assist in the greater safety of navigation and of the conduct of the ship” (SMCP:1). Since its compilation, the use of the SMCP has been required among officers in charge of a navigational watch on ships of 500 gross tonnage or more. VTS operators who are responsible for coordinating the movement of all vessels have been also trained with a textbook that was designed to be supposedly as close to the SMCP as possible to communicate with a ship in a satisfactory manner.
This study intends to examine how closely the textbooks used for VTS operators in China and Korea have adopted and utilized the SMCP. In doing so, the study analyzes and compares the data composed of textbooks used for VTS operators in China and Korea and the SMCP, focusing particularly on lexico-grammatical patterns.
Results and Discussion
Table
1 below presents basic statistical information of the SMCP, C-VTS, and K-VTS.
Table 1
Statistical information of SMCP, C-VTS, and K-VTS
|
Running Words |
Word Type |
TTR*
|
SMCP |
14,178 |
919 |
6.48 |
C-VTS |
14,004 |
1031 |
7.38 |
K-VTS |
5,742 |
901 |
16.24 |
As seen in Table
1, running words of the SMCP and the C-VTS are much greater than that of the K-VTS. This is so because the former two provided more diverse phrases that would be used in various contexts, while the K-VTS rather reflected confined situations. The K-VTS shows higher Type/Token Ratio (TTR) than that of C-VTS and SMCP. This means that there are more repeated words in the C-VTS and the SMCP than in the K-VTS. It happened presumably because all tildes (~) in the C-VTS and the SMCP were replaced with the same phrase given right before the tilde as mentioned earlier.
In order to see lexico-grammatical features of the data, top 30 words in the wordlists of each data were compared as seen in Table
2:
Table 2
Top 30 words in the wordlists of SMCP, C-VTS, and K-VTS
|
Running Words |
Word Type |
TTR |
1 |
the |
is |
is |
2 |
is |
W |
I |
3 |
N |
in |
the |
4 |
in |
N |
#*
|
5 |
L |
the |
you |
6 |
position |
to |
to |
7 |
to |
position |
of |
8 |
W |
L |
in |
9 |
I |
of |
a |
10 |
of |
you |
Suhyup |
11 |
MV |
I |
this |
12 |
you |
MV |
and |
13 |
T |
No |
your |
14 |
on |
your |
position |
15 |
at |
T |
will |
16 |
hours |
vessel |
have |
17 |
your |
my |
Jeju |
18 |
by |
at |
with |
19 |
will |
by |
please |
20 |
with |
from |
rescue |
21 |
from |
yes |
by |
22 |
have |
with |
boat |
23 |
vessel |
what |
on |
24 |
are |
assistance |
what |
25 |
assistance |
have |
vessel |
26 |
not |
will |
it |
27 |
what |
not |
at |
28 |
expected |
visibility |
are |
29 |
metres |
area |
there |
30 |
no |
expected |
ship |
Many of the words in the lists are overlapped although the rank of each word is a bit different. There are several words that draw attention in the textbook corpora. They are please, rescue, boat, it, there, and ship in the K-VTS and vessel, assistance and expected in the C-VTS.
First lexis that should be explained is please. Please is “one of the most transparent politeness markers that serves to soften the imposition carried out by the request being uttered.” (
Martinez-Flor, 2009: 38). Thus, it is encouraged for English learners to use it in the context where the requester wants to sound courteous and polite. As
Franceschi (2014) points out, the SMCP, spoken ME in general, however, appears to show “the general avoidance of politeness formulas in the imperative (e.g. I require assistance. (SMCP; 29))” to eliminate ambiguity (p.83). Please occurred 3 times in the C-VTS and 47 times in the K-VTS, but only once in the SMCP (i.e. Please confirm.). Following the guideline of the SMCP, the C-VTS revealed seldom use of please. K-VTS, however, represented a quite opposite tendency as seen in some examples below:
N Concordance
1 Wait for a minute please!
2 Say again please?
3 in position AI. Please call us through channel
Hence, it can be said that please in the K-VTS is rather used in its grammatical pattern of general English, but not as closely following the guideline of the SMCP as it should be.
Second, the use of nonreferential it and there was noticeable in the textbook corpora. It appeared 21 times in the C-VTS, 39 times in the K-VTS, and 22 times in the SMCP. Grammatically speaking, it can be used either as demonstrative pronoun or as nonreferential subject as seen in examples (1) and (2) below respectively:
-
A: Do you know where the remote control is?
B: It’s on the couch.
-
It’s raining.
In example (1), it refers to the remote control, yet in example (2), it does not refer to anything. It was used as a dummy subject in (2). With respect to the pronoun usage of it, the referent of demonstrative pronoun is context-dependent. In other words, it indicates a different thing depending on the context. This could cause confusion between communicators which must be avoided.
In the K-VTS, it functioned as nonreferential subject in 27 occurrences, and in 12 occurrences, as demonstrative pronoun. While in the C-VTS, only two demonstrative pronoun its were spotted (i.e. You must be responsible for it. You should report this matter to us as soon as you discover it). On the other hand, it occurred 22 times in the SMCP, and most of them were used as nonreferential subject. Only one case showed its usage as demonstrative pronoun (i.e. We will let go port anchor N shackle and dredge it.). SMCP was compiled to promote safety at sea by providing standard phrases that feature simplicity and clarity. From this perspective, the frequent use of the demonstrative pronoun it in the K-VTS seems to be problematic.
With the same concern, other demonstrative pronouns, this and that, in the data were scrutinized: This occurred 52 times in the C-VTS, 80 times in the K-TVS, and 13 times in the SMCP, while that appeared 3 and 8 times in the C-VTS and the K-VTS respectively and none in the SMCP. Statistically, both C-VTS and K-VTS employed more demonstrative pronouns than did the SMCP, which may cause confusion between communicators.
Nonreferential there showed the similar phenomenon. There can function either as nonreferential subject or as deictic adverb as seen in examples (3) and (4) below respectively:
(3) There’s a lot of noise here.
(4) A: Do you know where the remote control is?
B: It’s over there, on the couch.
There occurred 10 times in the C-VTS, 33 times in the K-VTS, and only 7 times in the SMCP. All theres in the SMCP functioned as nonreferential subject, no deictic use of there. 10 theres in the C-VTS were also found nonreferential. In the K-VTS, however, there was often used deictically (locatively) as seen examples extracted from the K-VTS data:
N Concordance
27 The helicopter will arrive there soon.
28 We will arrange another vessels around there.
Third, the word ship(s) occurred 11 times in the C-VTS and 36 times in the K-VTS, but none in the SMCP. As stated in the introduction of the IMO SMCP, it avoids synonyms, thus giving preference to a certain word among the members of a synonym group. In the case of the synonyms of ship, the word vessel is favored in the SMCP. This may be so because vessel is a catch-all term, which describes any floating object used for the carriage of people or goods. Vessel occurred 19 times in the K-VTS, which means the K-VTS prefers ship to vessel. In the case of C-VTS, 130 vessel(s) appeared 130 times, overnumbering ship(s).
Fourth, assistance and expected were another items that drew attention. Both words showed high frequencies in the SMCP (95 and 87 hits respectively) and the C-VTS (93 and 84 hits respectively), yet rarely or never occurred in the K-VTS (6 and 0 hit respectively). The collocates of assistance in the SMCP and C-VTS showed such words like require, medical, navigational, escort, tug, available, and so on. For expected, the collocates were variable, decrease, tides, situation, increase, visibility, etc. As can be seen, the collocates of both assistance and expected are common words that we can easily encounter in VTS communications. Interestingly, however, those two words were rarely or never occurred in the K-VTS.
Finally, a couple of disparate linguistic features were observed in the C-VTS and the K-VTS. First, in order to reduce miscommunications, the SMCP avoids using ambiguous words including some modal verbs. The modal verb, may, alone occurred twice in the same situation in the SMCP (i.e. You/MV may stop search and proceed with voyage). In the C-VTS, however, may occurred 8 times in different situations as seen in examples below:
N Concordance
1 You may be ready to get underway.
2 You may anchor until unknown objects is removed.
3 what time may I enter the lock?
K-VTS data presented more diverse ambiguous words, such as presumption words, likely and suppose, and modal verbs, could and may.
Second, according to
Mitkova, Genova, and Halid (2009), with respect to the usage of tense in the SMCP, the Present Continuous and Present and Future Simple tenses are common, while the Present Perfect tense is rarely used. In the C-VTS and the K-VTS, however, the Present Perfect tense was often used as seen in the extract from both corpora below:
C-VTS:
N Concordance
1 MV W has lost person overboard in position L.
2 You have anchored in the fairway.
3 I have located you on my radar.
K-VTS:
N Concordance
1 Has there been any oil spillage or personal casualty
2 There has been a vessel in distress in position
3 You have been dragged anchor due to strong wind
As seen thus far, the C-VTS and the K-VTS showed different linguistic features from the SMCP; The K-VTS revealed much more differences than did the C-VTS.