GENERAL ENGLISH AND MORE OR LESS TECHNICAL ESP ON THE EXAMPLE OF WORD LISTS

The renewed interest in vocabulary research, especially due to its meaning-carrying significance in technical Englishes, has cleared the way to the development of corpus linguistics methods based on real-life texts. As the learning/teaching of general English leads towards the learning/teaching of English for a Specific Purpose (in line with the learner’s needs), so the creation of general English word lists imposes the creation of technical word lists, aiming to achieve a desired level of the target corpus comprehension. In this paper, we discuss the common grounds and specifics of various levels of general and technical English in terms of their lexical coverage of texts, specifically addressing the example of marine engineering technical manuals.