Developing and Validating a Universal Maritime English Proficiency Test for Deck Officers

According to Paltridge and Starfield [1, p2], ‘English for Specific Purposes (ESP) refers to the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language where the goal of the learners is to use English in a particular domain’. In the case of Maritime English, this domain can be broken down into a number of areas including Deck and Engineer officers and Ratings. When teaching ESP, it is necessary to design appropriate assessment tools to allow learners to demonstrate their level of knowledge. In the case of a proficiency test, which is designed to measure ‘a candidate’s readiness for a particular communicative role, e.g. in a work or educational setting’ [2, p135], a test is used to standardise judgements of performance and progress [3, pp367-368]. This paper will introduce the transnational MariLang project 1 , which is tasked with developing and validating a universal proficiency test of Maritime English, to be used to measure the English language ability of Deck Officers around the world. We will present the necessary steps involved in the validation project and will introduce task types to demonstrate how the design of the test has been based on a detailed analysis of the Target Language Use (TLU) [4, p18] or ‘real-life’ domain in order to reflect as closely as possible the language abilities necessary for a Deck Officer (support level) or Deck Officer (support and management level)at sea.