The development of a technical word list and self-study material for aircraft maintenance students

Vocabulary teaching is an important and complex part of ESP research (Coxhead, 2013). Many studies have been carried out focusing on ESP vocabulary ranging from teaching and learning it, the needs of students, academic vocabulary to technical vocabulary (Nation, 2013; Parohinog and Meesri, 2015; Coxhead, 2001). Among various aspects of ESP vocabulary, aviation English holds a significant part dealing with the English for the people in the aviation industry. The importance of aviation English is closely associated with the public safety (Moder,2012), and the role of English is vital for aircraft maintenance technicians alongside with pilots and air traffic controllers. For aircraft maintenance, the relationship between ESP and vocabulary relies on technical vocabulary. Therefore, the aim of this study is to create a technical vocabulary list for aircraft maintenance students, to build a self-study material, and to evaluate the efficiency of this self-study material. So as to construct the technical vocabulary list, a corpus including 93,290 tokens was compiled from aircraft characteristics manuals. The target corpus was analyzed via AntWordProfiler and by experts to create the aircraft maintenance technical vocabulary list with 103 words. The analysis revealed that the words that are not included in the GSL and AWL constitute a large part (31%) of the target corpus. This generated technical vocabulary list was administered to 56 students as a pre-test to determine both the level of their vocabulary knowledge and the words to be incorporated into self-study material. After eliminating the words known by at least 50% of the students, the remaining 80 words constituted the self-study material content. The students studied the self-study material for four weeks. Consequent to their study, a post-test was administered to measure the effect of the four-week study. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the pre-test and post-test results. This study is an attempt to show the necessity of building a field-specific technical vocabulary list for aircraft maintenance students to help them expand their vocabulary knowledge in their field as these words comprise a large part of what they will encounter. Keywords: Word list, Technical vocabulary list, Self-study material, ESP vocabulary