Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural value principles for legal English teaching (1of2).wmv

This integration of law, linguistics, and pedagogy emanates from (1) a general paucity in research on English for Academic Legal Purposes (EALP), and (2) an acute awareness of the decline of communication skills of L1 and L2 legal English learners. The research paucity could be attributed to the level of specialty that EALP requires of instructors and learners. Additionally, it is a subject that is inherently interdisciplinary, which complicates research procedures. The decline of communication skills of learners could be explained by the internationalization of the classroom, which leaves students ill-informed of and unprepared for law school expectations.

The purpose of this project is to merge the interdisciplinary foundations of legal English that could explain and improve EALP education. These foundations include legal, linguistic, and pedagogical perspectives. Legal perspectives comprise of the natural law approach and constructive interpretation, which are respectively drawn from jurisprudence and hermeneutics. Systemic functional linguistics is the linguistic perspective that explains how language functions. The pedagogical approach relies on a genre-based pedagogy that includes English for Specific Purposes and the New Rhetoric that underscores the cross-cultural dimension.

The process of identifying interdisciplinary and cross-cultural value principles consists of two parts. Firstly, the theoretical foundations are critically reviewed to explain the dynamics of legal English pedagogy. Secondly, theoretical principles are then identified from the various perspectives and synthesized to create a set of value principles that could advance EALP teaching.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Interdisciplinarity
• cross-cultural
• EAP
• legal English