A corpus-based study on aviation English from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics

Aviation English (AE) is a distinct register of English used by pilots and air traffic controllers. As it is one of the contributing factors to aviation safety, ICAO and its Member States’ aviation authorities require the airspace users to have the proficiency in using AE effectively. In recent years, the training and testing have gained more attention, but little work has been done to describe its linguistic features. The study set out to describe AE from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics with an aim to illustrate its linguistic features as compared to conversational English (CE). To achieve this goal, the corpora of CE and AE communications between native English speakers from the United States were respectively constructed and then scrutinized to demonstrate that AE has a significant difference from CE in functional-semantic aspects. The findings of this study reveal how distinct AE with CE in terms of speech functions. Some pedagogical implications were then proposed for enhancing AE training to cultivate the students’ competence in semantics and interaction.