engleski

Development of lexical competence in ESP

Multiword lexical units (MWLUs) are one of the basic features of vocational language [7, p. 125], especially in English. However, owing to their high level of informativeness and compact expression, MWLUs are difficult to process and understand, therefore special care needs to be taken when teaching them in the context of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). In order to examine the way in which MWLUs are processed, a survey was conducted using 20 most frequent multiword units, consisting of three or more elements, selected from a corpus of texts (the so called crawl corpus), made in SketchEngine, from the area of Marine Engineering. The survey was conducted on four groups of subjects, with the aim of analysing how much knowledge of the world and knowledge of the language help us in understanding these units. The study showed that participants with higher level of knowledge of the world understand and use MWLUs with more success than those without such knowledge, but that participants with higher level of language knowledge will reach for their metalinguistic knowledge in understanding such phrases. Finally, the results of the survey showed that the noun + noun phrases are easier to understand and sort than adjective + noun phrases. The findings are discussed in the context of ESP teaching.

vocational language, multiword lexical units, knowledge of the language, knowledge of the world, ESP teaching.

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