Abstract
Maritime regulatory English is often taught through specialist terminology, alt-hough professional work starts elsewhere. A reader has to find the governing source, work through its conditions and exceptions, relate the wording to available evidence, and deliver a conclusion in a usable professional form. This conceptual article develops a domain-specific teaching model for English majors at Chinese maritime universities. The design is anchored in ESP’s task, needs, and genre-based orientation, while CLIL’s dual focus on disciplinary content and language serves primarily as an organizational heuristic for sequencing learning. It draws on an integrative reading of work on ESP, CLIL, legal language, genre pedagogy, and maritime education, together with a comparison of genres and tasks associated with SOLAS, MARPOL, STCW, UNCLOS, the Hague-Visby Rules, and GENCON. Reading across the six instruments brought four problems into view: interpreting modality and conditional language, following connected sources, testing a rule against evidence, and reshaping an analysis for a particular professional reader. The proposed cycle turns those problems into six stages, beginning with a realistic decision and ending with revision of a workplace genre. It also specifies choices concerning sequencing, assessment, teacher collaboration, source currency, and implementation fidelity. By making explicit how ESP-derived professional tasks are organized through a dual content-language focus, the model is intended to be concrete enough to be used, challenged, and examined in later classroom research.
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