Legal English/English Private Law

Teaching team: John O’Donoghue and Prof. Jörg Peter

University and degree programme: TH Wildau, Business and Law Master’s programme

Course: English Private Law/Legal English 5 ECTS

Timing: 2 four-hour lectures/classes over one semester

CLIL pilot type:

CLIL assignments: To develop the students’ legal vocabulary and consequently their understanding of concepts peculiar to the English common law system. To evaluate English case law.

Language: English

Introduction of the CLIL implementation with 10 CLIL parameters

• Sequence:

Introduction to English law and its historical development. Reading of cases and course material of the parallel content course English Private Law. Reviewing parallel material focusing on clarifying concepts and language. Previewing upcoming cases and legal concepts. To a great extent the students determined to what degree reviewing of lecture material was still required and how much previewing was necessary. This meant that the language course did not have a predetermined lesson-by-lesson plan week-by-week which led to some initial confusion among the students but then it became clear that the course was student-centred directed by the needs of the students. This required a certain amount of self-awareness on behalf of the students but the benefits of this approach soon became evident and appreciated.

• Concept and Task > Language:

Legal concepts evolve as the cases are read and discussed. Close attention to the language of the cases leads to understanding the  concepts inherent to English Common Law. This language focus moves from individual lexical items (abstract nouns and conjunctions) to common legal phrases that reflect legal thought processes and approaches.

• Guided multimedia input: History of England visually represented in a time line. Plots of cases visualized by students. As legal studies have such a strong focus on textual analysis it was the task of the language teacher to provide some relief by introducing visualisation tasks to allow the students to express their understanding in non-written form. The students were shown parts of lectures provided by the University of London introducing English common law to undergraduate students.  https://www.coursera.org/learn/intro-common-law
• Key language:

The master’s students were predominantly German native speakers who had completed their bachelor studies in German either at TH Wildau or nearby universities. There were some Erasmus+ students from Georgia who also attended. English was the dominant teaching language but at times it was useful for the students to refer to the German terms to determine similarities but more often differences between the German and English legal systems. It was also necessary to explain the difference in meaning between the common meaning of Engish and their specific legal meaning, e.g. consideration, equity.

In cultural terms legal language is, on the one hand, extremely precise and, on the other hand, can be expressed in somewhat vague terms as when English judges explain their rulings. This language has to be deconstructed to become clear to those students who understand the literal meaning of such utterances but fail to understand the deeper significance.

• Common Legal bundles/fixed phrases such as: On the basis (that), In (the) terms of, In relation to, On behalf of (those). Extended legal bundles followed by abstract noun: In light of the … fact, data available, testimony, question, possibility.
• Collocation verbs and nouns: Match the verb to the noun to make a sentence:

Verbs: pass, identify, adduce, obtain, approve, pay, issue, avoid, apply, provide.

Nouns: possession, party, contract, title, principle, proceedings, principle, deposit, certainty, evidence.

• Common conjunctions in English Legal texts. While, As, Since, Though, So, Unless, Whereas, Provided, Albeit, Insofar, Whilst, Especially if. What function do these conjunctions play and why are they so common in legal language? (See 5.8)
• Scaffolding: In order to provide English Law students with a framework for analyzing cases and distinguishing between legal points in apparently similar cases such scaffolding paragraphs were drawn up based on the cases that the content professor was discussing in the parallel course English Private Law.

Cases 7 Poussard v Spears and Pond and 8 Bettini v Gye.

In contrast to case 7 where the contract was ___________________, in case 8 the ______________

Therefore/consequently _________________

Cases 9 Chapleton v Barry UDC, 10 Curtis v Chemical Cleaning and Dyeing C, 11 Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking Ltd.

These cases are in similar in terms of __________________

However, there is a difference regarding _______________________

Therefore/consequently ___________________

• Instructions:

The Legal English course was a combination of language and content that interacted with the students by offering both open questions and discussion with closed questions and specific content-targeted questions. Using the CLIL concept of scaffolding, the dense content course was broken down and restructured to render the somewhat daunting material accessible to the German-speaking students.

The language teacher checked the students’ understanding of terms and concepts and through counter-questions the students could check the language teacher’s comprehension of English legal concepts. The content teacher was also checking the students’ understanding and preparation of course material which indirectly represented checking on the quality of preparation provided by the language teacher (including explanations of legal concepts). This occasionally led to correcting misunderstandings regarding the precise meaning of legal concepts. 

• Interactions:

The Legal English course was conceived as acting simultaneously as a preview and review of the course content of English Private Law. The language-focused Legal English course dealt with the same material as the English Private Law course taught by a German professor. Legal English went through the cases that were to be discussed later in the week in the lecture course English Private Law to ensure that the basic plot and vocabulary of each case was familiar to all the students, i.e., who did what when and how and why? As the cases were systematically chosen in pairs to highlight both similarities and differences between these pairs a close reading of cases was important so that on the simple level of plot the students were familiar with the cases discussed by the Law professor before he proceeded to consider the legal principles that the cases represented. The students reported that the fact that the language teacher was not a legal expert and openly admitted to gaps in legal knowledge helped to reduce the level of stress or anxiety that these students occasionally experienced in the more demanding content lectures where expectations were high. The language class was also an opportunity to collect and phrase pertinent questions concerning the content that the students would then pose to the content teacher later in the week. The content professor confirmed that this process of phrasing and rehearsing clear questions in the language class was a useful preparation for the opening of his lecture class where these questions were answered from a strictly legal and precisely academic perspective. This process helped to focus the attention of students who otherwise tended to be somewhat taciturn and reluctant to ask or answer questions.

• Thinking:

By its very nature law is deeply entrenched in the national culture where it is practiced and has jurisdiction. Consequently, it is sometimes a subject that is only taught in the national language due to the fact that some its concepts cannot be (adequately) translated into a foreign language with a corresponding foreign legal system. This is particularly true in countries where a different legal system prevails as is the case in Germany which has a civil code, a continental legal system and not a common law system as in the United Kingdom. Therefore, international business law is necessarily taught in English to German and international students and requires that the students adapt their thinking from a continental approach to law (which they have studied in their bachelor degree courses) to a common law/case law approach. Language is at the same time an obstacle to understanding as there is sometimes no easy translation (into German) for key concepts in English law, yet language serves also as the key to understanding an essentially foreign approach to lawmaking (e.g. such lexical items as case law and binding precedent). Students observed that as the semester went on they used German translations less frequently as they understood that the English term did not have a corresponding term that helped their understanding. Even when discussing English law in German certain original English terms were used as there was no practical German equivalent. This demonstrated the students’ developing learning and thinking processes.

• Supported output:

The students prepared case evaluations as part of a mock exam that were first checked by the language teacher and then evaluated by the content teacher and subsequently rechecked by the language teacher to ensure that the content teacher’s evaluation was understood. The students were invited to explain what changes the content teacher had made to their text and the reason behind these changes. Some students did not feel comfortable performing this task.

It also proved useful to focus on the linguistic devices and structures that the content teacher employed to construct his own case evaluation (see below 5.8), specifically, highlighting the progression of specific conjunctions and conditionals. This served as a template for the students’ own writing

• Feedback:

As these language and content courses were directly connected there was a wide variety of feedback. The language teacher was able to gain an insight into how the students were processing the content in English Private Law through discussion and questions. The German professor often checked with the students whether they had already covered cases in the language class so that he could proceed with his lecture. As the language and content teachers had their offices on the same floor of the faculty building on campus there were many opportunities for informal exchange between the two teachers on the progress of both courses. 

• Team teaching:

The nature of this cooperation meant that the language teacher attended a series of lectures delivered by the content teacher, Professor Peter, as a guest. The language teacher occasionally asked questions throughout the class in that semester and had informal conversations with Professor Peter regarding the legal content of this course English Private Law. This cooperation was content driven and therefore required that the language teacher embraced a new topic and spent time getting to know the content and becoming familiar with new lexis, concepts and ways of reasoning and arguing within a legal framework.

• Further development ideas:

Developing opportunities for joint teaching sessions to integrate the elements of language and content more closely.

Download the file here: Legal English Language exercises