This article introduces some insights into the nature and features of maritime English and studies the effect of those on the future Maritime English syllabus. In this respect two approaches to the syllabus are highlighted: (a) the minimalist approach oriented to meet the minimum requirements the STCW Convention 1978/1995 (basically ensuring safe communication using appropriate parts of SMCP 2001), and (b) the extended approach within which Maritime English becomes a comprehensive educational subject within the overall Maritime Education and Training (MET) curriculum and ensures the future holder of a maritime academic degree efficient competence in English for conducting both sea and shore-based duties. To this end, the growing role and importance of General English within the Maritime English syllabus is emphasised. In order to be able to study the modern developments in Maritime English, a proposal is made for starting an international project of compiling and maintaining a web-based corpus of Maritime English, i.e. a textual and terminological database to be at the disposal of the students, Maritime English teachers and subject teachers in their research, learning and teaching activities. IntroductionThis article deals with some theoretical and practical aspects of syllabus design for Maritime English based on the nature of Maritime English, needs analysis and their relationship to the Maritime Education and Training (MET) system.Principally, two approaches to the study of the role of Maritime English in the overall syllabus for MET courses are traceable today:• the minimalist (i.e. training-oriented) approach, and • extended, i.e. comprehensive educational approach.In the minimalist approach Maritime English syllabus only covers the unavoidable minimum requirements imposed by the IMO STCW Convention 1978/1995 for seagoing certificates of competence and, partly, by the ISM Code. The knowledge of English and competence in Maritime English for officers of the watch in this category are highly restricted in their scope and contents to the important task of the safety of

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Lexical bundles are recurring frequent word combinations. Research has shown that lexical bundles vary in genre and register (Biber 2006; Biber, Conrad and Cortes 2004; Hyland 2008a, 2008b; Scott and Tribble 2006). However, the degree to which they vary by discipline remains inconclusive. The main aim of this paper is to establish whether lexical bundles are discipline specific, i.e., whether each discipline draws on a specialized lexical repertoire or whether there is a core vocabulary shared across various disciplines. For that purpose, maritime texts covering the subdomains marine engineering, navigation, maritime law and shipping have been collected so as to investigate the structure and function of lexical bundles and to find out how they shape meaning in specialized discourse. For the purposes of the study, a 7.4 M corpus consisting of two monolingual subcorpora and one bilingual subcorpus was compiled. This corpus can be used as a basis for further studies in the field. Furthermore, the paper discusses problems encountered while extracting N-grams from a corpus, as well as classification criteria for the identification of lexical bundles. The results show that lexical bundles identified in maritime texts are phrasal rather than clausal. The results also indicate that lexical bundles are discipline specific. Teaching these specialized features that shape discourse can improve students’ language production and should thus be the focus of instruction in ESP.