Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
My 11-year-old daughter plays Among Us frequently these days, as apparently does every other pre-teen I’m aware of.
I have yet to play it, though I understand it’s a multiplayer, social game you can play on a smartphone or tablet. It’s set on a spaceship, you play with a group of 10 people (could be people you know or random people you don’t know or a mix), and the aim is to solve problems or complete certain tasks with your crewmates. However, one of you is an impostor who apparently sabotages the crew’s efforts by killing crew members. And each time a crew member is killed, then everyone stops and has a discussion about who might have done it and tries to figure out who did it.
Question: How could this be used as a teaching tool? Especially given the desire and potential to engage students, particularly in the context of online or remote learning?
According to high school teacher Angelique Gianas, Among Us is an excellent vehicle for teaching students about argumentative writing. (“How ‘Among Us’ Helps Students Master Argumentative Writing“) It requires students to devise claims and then support them with evidence and analysis.
But could this also be appropriate and helpful in working with LLMs and other non-native English speaking law students?
My initial thought is that Among Us could be used as a first-day-of-class activity for a legal writing class or during orientation. And then in subsequent classes, the process in which students engaged can be referenced in discussing the discourse of legal writing or when providing feedback to students who tend towards conclusive statements.
This could be particularly helpful to students from other countries or cultural backgrounds who are accustomed to a different approach to argumentative writing. At the same time, some of this could get flushed out in the initial playing of the game if students from different backgrounds have different approaches to the problem solving and communicating entailed by the playing of Among Us.
Of course, I have yet to try any of this. So if you or anyone you know has incorporated Among Us into a class with their students, I would greatly appreciate hearing about it and hopefully writing about it in a future post.
According to the website, “The purpose of the Pronouncing Dictionary of United States Supreme Court cases is to help conscientious lawyers, judges, teachers, students, and journalists correctly pronounce often-perplexing case names.”
For each case, there are two or three phoneticized spellings to help with pronunciation. Plus, if you click on the phoneticized pronunciation, you get an audio clip of the tricky name being pronounced.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
This is a really fascinating video on American regional accents published by Wired, and also a decent primer on how pronunciation works. Also, it gets into various Black, Latinx, Native American and various creole accents in America which isn’t something I’ve seen in other videos I’ve come across on American accents.
And it sounds like there’s a Part 2 coming in the near future. Very much looking forward to that one!
Special thanks to my friend and creative exhibit developer Lee Patrick for making me aware of this video.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
In case of interest, my innovative colleague Jonah Perlin (professor of legal practice and advanced legal writing at Georgetown Law) has a new podcast called “HowILawyer” in which he talks to different lawyers about what they do every day, how they do it well, their path to their current position, etc. The idea is to provide a more transparent view of something most of us (myself fully included) knew little about until we left law school and started working.
I found the 24 Hours book, btw, in response to an LLM student from Italy mentioning to me how she found herself at a loss to answer a question from an American lawyer about what kind of law she wanted to practice. In her country, she explained, there were only two answers to such a question: 1) criminal practice, or 2) civil practice (i.e., everything else.)
In the US, she learned, there are a wide variety of paths and options, and she recognized it was important to know about those just to be able to have intelligent conversations. And I then realized this is an important and valuable area of background or cultural knowledge that LLM students need to acquire. Yet as I looked around, I found relatively few resources for providing this cultural knowledge that are appropriate and easily accessible for LLM students.
As a result, I’m very thankful that Jonah decided to start this podcast, and I assume it will be a potentially helpful resource for others in the legal English teaching field to be aware of.
Entertaining side note: When I used 24 Hours With 24 Lawyers a few years ago for an LLM summer book club discussion, I realized there was one profile that went right over their heads: An in-house counsel entertainment lawyer for a global adult entertainment company.
Though you and I, the worldly people we are, understand the connotation of “adult entertainment,” my LLM students did not. And as we started our discussion, I realized they also did not fully understand the lawyer’s nuanced description of various other legal issues he had to deal with, nor his description of an end-of-the-day meeting with some “talent” at a fancy bar to discuss a potential video deal. It was on me to awkwardly life the veil. (And it felt sort of like that moment when you explain to a child that Santa Clause is not real. 🙂
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
Thank you to ETLEP Group member Nigel Bruce, Principal Language Consultant at Hong Kong Shue Yan University, for sharing this tongue-in-cheek video of how linguists (whoda thunkit!) will save as from the pandemic by focusing on plosives.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
The below blog post from EAP Essentials–“Should we teach grammar? Yes but no but!” by Olwyn Alexander is a thoughtful and healthy reaction to the shift away from “teaching grammar,” which itself has been a reaction to the perceived flaws in the traditional ways of teaching grammar. However, there’s been a shift back towards the teaching of grammar–conditioned on the premise that it’s “done right”–as more thought and research has gone into better ways to help students acquire grammar.
What the “right” or “best” way to teach grammar is is still up for debate. But overall there is a recognition that grammar is not sufficiently acquired just by exposure (e.g., Krashen and the “natural method”), particularly when it comes to academic English (or legal English for that matter.) Intentional effort and guidance is needed to help learners acquire the grammar they need to communicate effectively at the academic English level.
But from that starting point of recognition, there is still a wide divergence on understanding and belief as to what “done right” ultimately means. I definitely don’t have all the answers. But I do have a few beliefs on the topic:
1. Form should follow function: The grammar that is studied should hue as closely to the content being studied and the communicative needs associated with that content. In this regard, a field like legal English is ideal from a teaching perspective because we have ready-made content and communicative purposes. It’s just a matter of scaffolding the content and then mining it for the grammar needed.
2. Grammar Fluency: It’s not enough just to learn and practice an aspect of grammar. There need to be repeated, natural exposures. And ideally in the regular course of studying the content. It’s hard to contrive natural ways to encounter grammar structures. But it’s a lot easier if you start with the content, work backwards to identify the grammar needs associated with it, and then develop grammar focus and curriculum based on those materials. And that allows for repeated exposures. Additional thought on repeated exposures: One of the advantages kids have is that they like repetition. As evidence, I cite the number of times my kids have watched and sung the songs from “Frozen” and other Disney movies as well as the number of times children like to read the same book over and over. Adults, on the other hand, are prone to getting bored. And that’s significant because motivation is a significant component of language learning. So creativity is key in figuring out how to generate repeated exposures for adult learners.
3. Ear Training: I think this aspect of grammar learning is vastly underrepresented in discussions of how to teach grammar. Especially since so much of grammar comes down to having a sense of what “sounds right.”
As native speakers of English, not only do we spend very little time thinking about the rules of the grammar we use, for the most part we never thought about them when we learned the appropriate grammar. This is particularly true of articles, prepositions, and -s endings (e.g., 3rd person and plurals.)
These are grammar points that so many of our LLM students struggle with. And these also happen to be parts of speech that are harder to hear, especially if your ear is not used to hearing them. In other words, if you can train your ear to hear those sounds, then you’ll hear them more and you’ll develop a sense of what sounds right and start using them more accurately in your own speech and writing.
There is of course much more to learning and teaching grammar than my above points. But Alexander’s blog post got me thinking about what drives much of my focus and decision-making in teaching grammar to my students, so I thought I would try to add to the conversation. Feel free to share your own thoughts.
Here are the first few paragraphs of Alexander’s blog post from EAP Essentials along with a “Continue reading” link at the end.
I was asked recently by a head of pathways programmes at an international college whether we should teach grammar in EAP. This manager was under pressure from some teachers to introduce a more structured approach to teaching and testing grammar. Some years previously, prompted by feedback from an external moderator, they had developed a bespoke grammar workbook, which was ‘aligned with the topics taught in the course, [covering] the language features which are considered to be salient in scholarly English [and targeting] areas where students show weaknesses when it comes to academic writing’. The workbook covers language patterns, such as noun phrases, active and passive voice, conditionals and modal verbs. However, teachers on the programmes have a number of issues with the resource:
There is little time to teach grammar in the course
It feels artificial to teach grammar this way (grammar rules and explanations, followed by practice)
It does not address all issues that students have when it comes to grammar
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
From 11/25/20 xkcd (“A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”)
And go to the Language Log blog (which is where I first aw this xkcd webcomic) for some great linguist commentary and reactions to this.
Ever since reading this webcomic, my life ambition has become to put it on a coffee mug and give the mugs out to everyone else at the law school outside of the Legal English Team to help shift the perception of the ways we help LLM students and other non-native English speaking law students.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
For anyone who’s interested in learning more about linguistics from a language teaching perspective or who’s thought about doing a masters in applied linguistics or TESOL but doesn’t have the time, the creators of the Lingthusiasm podcast now have a YouTube channel with a series of short videos on the basics of linguistics called Crash Course Linguistics.
Can a lexicographer fend off the combined forces of Facebook, the Justice Department and the entire U.S. business lobby at the U.S. Supreme Court?
What if said lexicographer is also the co-author, with Justice Antonin Scalia, of a landmark book about textualism that is cited multiple times in the other side’s briefs?
Bryan Garner – the Black’s Law Dictionary editor, legal writing consultant and, with Justice Scalia, author of Reading Law – has joined the Supreme Court team of Noah Duguid, a Montana man who sued Facebook in 2015 for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. And though he’s only been working with Duguid’s other lawyers for a matter of weeks, Garner’s influence on Duguid’s just-filed merits brief is unmistakable. Who else could so boldly assert that the TCPA’s meaning depends on whether the statute’s “adverbial modifier” applies to just one or both “disjunctive verbs” with a “common object”?
Without taking anything away from the well-deserved kudos for Bryan Garner, I want to underline how odd it is to suggest that without his help, lawyers couldn’t be expected to understand simple grammatical concepts like “adverbial modifier”, “disjunctive verb”, and “common object”.
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
I’ve realized in my legal English teaching that a lot of LLM students are not very familiar with American geography. And yet it’s very helpful background knowledge to know about in the context of studying in law school. I thought about it again today because my kids just got a game called The Scrambled States of America Game.
It’s based on a very clever children’s book called the Scrambled States of America. But more importantly, it can be an engaging and fun way for LLM students to get more familiar with American geography.
The way the Scrambled States of America Game seems to work (after watching my kids play it today) is that each person has 5 state cards in front of them. Each state has the state name, the capital, and the state’s nickname. Then you draw a card from the deck and it says something like “A state nickname with 4 different vowels in it.” So you look at your cards to see if you have one that fits the requirement, and you try to be the first to say that state’s name before the other players can identify one from their state cards. There’s also a map without state names that is put out that has some purpose that I haven’t had time to determine yet.
But it seems to create a lot of repeated exposures to state names and locations while connecting basic knowledge about states in a way that’s fun and leads to absorption of the info. On top of that, it’s social and a good ice-breaker. Plus it leads to lots of back and forth negotiating and commenting, all of which is good for speaking and listening practice.
Conclusion: This would be an ideal great game to play during LLM Orientation. Well, in a normal non-pandemic year anyway. And in that regard, it wouldn’t hurt if an online version could be created.
