From tradition to innovation? A diachronic corpus analysis of simplified technical English in aviation

Abstract

Reading comprehension and fluency are fundamental for successful text processing, particularly in high-stakes environments like aviation maintenance where unclear technical documentation can have fatal consequences. This risk is amplified by the significant proportion of non-native English speakers in the global aviation maintenance workforce. While Simplified Technical English (STE) was introduced in the mid-1980s as an international specification to address these challenges and has evolved through continuous user feedback, its effectiveness in reducing text complexity and improving comprehension remains underexplored. This research examines language changes in aviation maintenance documentation from pre-1990 to 2024, analyzing linguistic variations across two generations of technical manuals for a widely used narrow-body commercial aircraft from an 8.2-million-word corpus. Employing Biber's Multi-Dimensional Analysis (1988) alongside Coh-Metrix (Graesser et al., 2004), the study uncovers significant linguistic variations: later-generation texts demonstrate higher levels of interactive and accessible plain language style (Dimension 1), while higher Dimension 6 scores indicate enhanced real-time informational elaboration oriented towards immediate contextual demands. Follow-up experiments isolating eight distinctive linguistic features reveal that linguistic simplification can be a double-edged sword; while enhancing accessibility, it may inadvertently diminish essential textual attributes that facilitate comprehension. This research offers valuable insights for future STE development, emphasizing the need to balance immediate comprehensibility and operational safety with the preservation of textual cohesion and appropriate linguistic complexity.