From text to training: Understanding and teaching safety discourse in aircraft maintenance manuals

Aviation maintenance has a controlled language for what technicians read, but not for what they write. Simplified Technical English (STE) defines an approved vocabulary and writing rules for aerospace manuals, yet the technicians who read those manuals and write their own records are seldom taught the standard. Most are second language (L2) English users, and many maintenance records remain unclear, a recognized contributor to incidents involving critical equipment and severe consequences. This paper turns a corpus description of aviation maintenance English (AME) into a framework for training and materials design. It draws on Wang and Friginal (2025), a multi-dimensional analysis of a 27-million-word corpus of maintenance manuals compared with general written English. That study characterizes STE-influenced AME as informationally dense, low in abstraction, and carefully planned. On that basis, the paper derives four teachable competencies: managing useful elaboration, maintaining lexical precision, simplifying procedural syntax, and maintaining referential clarity. It then shows how each is taught through a notice-to-transfer sequence and assessed with a feature checklist and a reader-response rubric. Reading and writing are treated as connected but distinct: technicians must decode manuals at speed and produce records of comparable clarity.