Using discipline-specific corpora data-driven learning in an EFL-medium university setting: The case of apprehend and apprehension in legal pleading

Abstract

Undergraduate law students need to develop competence in the construction of legal arguments. Attainment of this competence is commonly assessed in their ability to construct arguments which follow the written conventions of the genre, prior to rehearsing those arguments orally in a simulation of a court case. In the law degree programme, which is the context for the pedagogical practices described in this paper, these assessments are built into each successive year of the law major in the form of mooting exercises for which students construct arguments for prosecution or defence and present them in a full-scale legal case simulation in a real courtroom in front of an invited judge.

In preparing their legal arguments, students are supported in the production of written submissions by feedback from language consultants which includes directing them to an online corpus-based writing assistant. This 26-million word, single-genre corpus of judicial case reports is accompanied by a search engine designed to present students with concordances which are transparent and intuitive in guiding them to the appropriate usage of the key patterns of legal English they are expected to use in their arguments.

The paper describes the linguistic challenges posed by legal English, how those challenges can be met with the help of the corpus-based writing assistant and how the program addresses known problems with direct DDL. A case study is presented demonstrating the scaffolding provided to first- and second-year students in learning to use the program and students’ evaluations of the corpus-based approach are summarised.