“What prompted you to combine Law and English as a Second Language?”
“What connections do you see between writing for lawyers, linguistics, English as a Second Language, and the plain language movement? How do you see these fields working together to promote clarity and equity?”
“How can other lawyers help clients who speak English as a second language? What should lawyers know about ESL processing that would help them better serve clients?”
“How can professors help students who speak English as a second language?”
Below are some quotes from the interview:
“In Japan I encountered so many situations and behaviors that felt uncomfortable and at times even irrational. I learned to stop myself and consider the possibility that it actually was rational if you’re working from a different set of assumptions. And I learned to question and evaluate my own assumptions about how things should work before I fell back on a judgmental view or comment. It’s led me to a passionate curiosity for trying to understand why people do things they do.”
“The plain English movement is a reaction to a sense that the writing of lawyers and judges had become unnecessarily complicated and was acting as a barrier to access to justice. Although not stated explicitly, the plain English movement seems to me to assume native English speakers as its primary users and consumers. Legal English, on the other hand, is a catch-all term relating to the approach and curriculum for helping lawyers and law students from other language backgrounds study or work with US (or UK, Canadian, Australian, etc.) law or contracts in English.”
“The primary overlap [between Plain English and Legal English] is probably with regard to input. In the case of plain English, if you simplify language and use fewer words, then there is less information to process, both in volume and complexity. That should work to the benefit of non-native English speakers. In other words, using plain English makes a text closer to the idea of “comprehensible input.” Of course, it’s also possible that even a text that meets plain English standards could still be challenging for a non-native English speaker to understand for a variety of reasons, including vocabulary, grammar, and cultural knowledge gaps. And of course among non-native English speakers, there will also always be a wide range of facility with English.”
“However, it seems to me that plain English and legal English begin to diverge regarding output. This is because plain English can often be conveyed as a series of prescriptivist rules and principles for how to use and not use language. Whereas in legal English, the priority is generally learning to communicate one’s ideas accurately, with style a little lower down the priority list depending on the student. From a legal English teaching perspective, we want the students to learn to feel confident in expressing their ideas.”
Prof. Klammer is a Legal English Lecturer & Research Fellow at Georgetown Law. Currently earning her Ph.D. in Law from Universidad de Palermo in Argentina, Paula is an experienced lawyer and translator and is bilingual in Spanish and English.
In legal English (and in life), mistakes are good.
Educators often talk about what and how we teach our students. But in my last semester as a Legal English Fellow at Georgetown, I want to share what I’m learning from the two colleagues who have taken me under their wings.
The number one pain point of many legal English learners is their lack of confidence in their oral communication skills….. They’re afraid that communication mistakes will be interpreted as if they don’t know what they are talking about (law-wise) or that people will think they are not good lawyers.
This week’s most valuable lesson can be summed up like this: it’s good to make mistakes. Here’s a little context: In Prof. Julie Lake’sOral Communication in the Law class which is part of Georgetown’s Two-Year LLM Program, students were given prompts to practice their oral communication skills. The class is designed to start students off within their comfort zones and help build up their confidence as legal English speakers.
Prof. Julie Lake
The number one pain point of many legal English learners is their lack of confidence in their oral communication skills. Like their English-speaking colleagues, non-native English speakers are highly intelligent and well-versed in their legal systems. They want nothing more than to display their exceptional lawyering skills in English, but they often doubt their ability to communicate effectively. They’re afraid that communication mistakes will be interpreted as if they don’t know what they are talking about (law-wise) or that people will think they are not good lawyers.
This is a legitimate fear. Nobody wants to be embarrassed, especially not when practicing law. That’s why oral communication training is not just about getting students to speak English, but to do so in a way that builds up their confidence. Students know a lot more than they realize and they are often much better at communicating in English than they think.
So Prof. Lake gives students prompts that are personalized to each individual and serve as both a diving board for them to start speaking, and also as an ice-breaker for them to get to know each other and to build a sense of community. Ultimately, the underlying feeling at the end of each of Prof. Lake’s classes is that we are all in this together, and this is a safe space for students to speak English, make mistakes, and learn.
Mistakes are welcome and should be embraced. Mistakes are learning opportunities. And making mistakes in English doesn’t reflect poorly on learners as lawyers. Mistakes are, according to Prof. Lake, when learning happens. So my favorite takeaway this week is to welcome mistakes.
Prof. Weger with Georgetown Law alumni in front of Deoksugung Palace
Summer 2023 was packed with legal English endeavors! A highlight was meeting up with LL.M. and J.D. alumni during a visit to South Korea, generously hosted by Law Center alumnus, Chairman Seung-Hoon Lee .
The opportunity to connect with our multilingual community in a global setting affirms the legacy of the Georgetown experience. I was delighted to share insights about our Two-Year LL.M. program with these colleagues and welcome two of our incoming students.
Back in the U.S., I’ve been excitedly working on the release of the next issue of AL Forum, the Applied Linguistic Newsletter for TESOL, a publication I co-edit with Dr. Natalia Dolgova. This issue will explore the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), such as the emergent use of ChatGPT, on educational practices; it includes articles from Georgetown colleagues Professor Stephen Horowitz and Technology Specialist Ellery Boatright.
Research also found a way into the summer! Professor Julie Lake and I are collaborating on upcoming conference presentations and publications that focus on integrating asset-based pedagogical practices into Legal English education. As this busy summer wraps up, I look forward to an even busier school year!
Professor Lake had a wonderful summer traveling around the U.S. with her husband and daughter. She spent a week at Cape May, NJ at the beach, a week in Chapel Hill, NC, and a week in Philadelphia, PA.
During her summer she made progress on her personal “language-based” summer project to learn Spanish. Language learning is a lifetime journey!
Professor Lake also spent time working with Professor Weger to revise the language-focused curriculum for Fundamentals of Legal Writing for the 2023-2024 academic year. In Fall 2023, incoming Two-Year students will learn how to use language-based strategies to craft a high-quality memo (i.e., a lawyer-to-lawyer document). In Spring 2024, incoming Two-Year students will learn about the scholarly writing genre and how to write a high-quality mini-scholarly legal research paper.
And finally, Professor Lake enjoyed researching productive ways to use ChatGPT as a learning tool for law and linguistic students.
Professor Dundon began his summer by presenting at the Sixth International Language & Law Conference at the University of Bialystok Faculty of Law in Bialystok, Poland in June (see prior post).
He then taught a summer class, Introduction to U.S. Contract Drafting and Interpretation at IE University Law School in Madrid, Spain, where he has taught for the past three summers.
In July, Professor Dundon presented a paper, When multilingual litigants encounter monolingual ideologies in U.S. judicial opinions, at the Twelfth Bonn Applied Linguistics Conference in Bonn, Germany; he’s been invited back to Bonn to appear as a discussant in a conference focused on legal discourse, taking place in September (more on that in a future post).
He also traveled in Morocco, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with family, before returning to Georgetown to teach U.S. Legal Research, Analysis, and Writing as part of the LL.M. Summer Experience program.
Professor Dundon ended the summer with a presentation at Georgetown Law’s faculty summer research workshop, where he spoke about his paper “A shifting precipice of unsettled law?”: A survey of how U.S. courts treat expert testimony using forensic stylistics, which was published this month in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.
Prof. Yi Song takes a selfie with Prof. Michael Cedrone and their Georgetown Summer Experience “Foundations for American Law” class.
1. Summer Teaching
Professor Yi Song taught two courses during the Summer Experience – “Foundations for American Law” (co-teaching with Professor Michael Cedrone) and her summer stable, “U.S. Legal Research, Analysis and Writing.”
She’s especially proud of being responsible for the idea of the group assignment for the Foundations class.
In July 2023, 102 international lawyers from around the world walked into McDonough 203 as strangers.
They were asked to form 10 groups to present before class “What I have learned from the Foundations so far.”
In the subsequent 10 days, we saw history reenacted as Marbury v. Madison came alive.
Like most historic events, it all began with a fateful night at the bar.
The foundations of the American legal system were reimagined in the multiverse with the prompt “what if the Founding Fathers were_____?”
An uncanny Professor Cedrone Impersonator? A jury trial, where a top international model found herself in the midst of legal dramas? A tort case that occurred on the premises of Georgetown Law, inspired by the Office-style-behind-the-scene footage?
When Dean Treanor came in one morning for a surprise visit, Prof. Song regretted that she forgot to take a group class selfie with him. But the one she got with Professor Cedrone still came out pretty good.
Master of Laws Interviews Project has come to the classroom this summer. Season 2 is being recorded now. Stay tuned for the Fascinating journeys such as how a lawyer got hired and became the first shareholder with international background in a firm’s 137 year history; How a former star student from legal research and writing class successfully turned her externship into the international associate position at BigLaw. And more!
Prof. Michelle Ueland (standing, far left) with fellow presenters and faculty at Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica.
I was an invited keynote speaker for this conference in Costa Rica (at a branch campus of my MA alma mater, la Universidad Nacional) on August 17 & 18. I gave two presentations (#1 and #2 below) and the closing plenary (#3).
1. “Advancing Listening and Speaking Skills in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Classrooms”
2. “In Your Voice and In Your Shoes: Experiencing Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play “English”
3. “What’s all the chatter about? Writing educators’ pedagogical responses to generative artificial intelligence (AI) products like ChatGPT-3.5”
I presented at the Global Legal Skills Conference at Nottingham Law School at Nottingham Trent University, England (July 30-Aug 1, 2023). My presentation was titled “Addressing international law students’ pronunciation needs: Best-practices informed by linguistics research and pedagogy.”
Abstract
Although professors notice issues in their international students’ speech, they may not feel equipped to address them. This presentation will cover four research-based, best practices for teaching second language (L2) pronunciation: orienting towards intelligibility, creating task-based lessons, increasing talk-time, and giving feedback.
Many L2 speakers express a desire to “eliminate their accents”, however, accents carry valuable information of our diverse identities and experiences. Teachers can instead help students reorient towards the crucial feature of communication called intelligibility, which asks if the listener received the message the speaker intended to convey. Oral skills can then be addressed through task-based teaching, which focuses on tasks students face (e.g., oral case briefs, negotiations) and guides them through the language necessary to complete them. Third, increasing the amount of productive (versus receptive) interactions in the target language will help students to see progress more rapidly. One suggestion is assigning a video reflection after observing courtroom proceedings. Finally, explicit pronunciation feedback can be a salient tool for progress. Feedback can focus on unintelligible speech, articulation of a sound, and spoken grammar.
These four approaches can be applied in any classroom around the world. Digital access to all teaching materials will be provided.
Shuguftah Quddoos, the first Asian woman to serve as the Sheriff of Nottingham
Also,….
A fun tidbit about the city was that it is the birth place of the Robin Hood lore, and there is actually a real Sheriff of Nottingham position (from what I learned, it’s apparently similar to Mayor).
The current Sheriff is the first Asian woman to hold the position, and we learned from her that all the city buses and trams are electric vehicles too.
GLS was a great small conference, and next year it will be in Bari, Italy!
Georgetown Legal English professors John Dundon and Stephen Horowitz together with National Chengchi University law professor Anna Yan
*Collaborated with a USAID Ukrainian representative to establish online legal English training programs for Ukrainian law faculty starting in Fall 2023. The effort has involved identifying interested US legal English instructors and matching their areas of expertise with the interests of Ukrainian law faculty.
*Set up assessments (pro bono) for female judges from Afghanistan preparing to enter LLM programs at US law schools. The project, which involved collaboration with Prof. Daniel Edelson (Seton Hall/USLawEssentials.com) and Prof. Lindsey Kurtz (Penn State Law), was at the request of an ABA initiative working to mentor and support female Afghan judges.
*Taught a 4-week online Bar Exam Essay Writing for LLM Students course during May/June, in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Edelson. The mission (and experiment) was to make the course accessible to any LLM or non-native English speaking law student, regardless of ability to pay, and it worked well. A second section of the course had to be created to accommodate excessive demand.
*Wrote a soon-to-be published article abou for AL Forum, the Applied Linguistic Newsletter for TESOL, about using ChatGPT to create tax vocabulary practice activities.
*Invited to guest lecture (via Zoom) for a legal English course at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan during the fall 2023 semester.
*Had the opportunity to meet visiting scholar Professor Anna Yan, who teaches law at National Chengchi University in Taiwan and show her the new Legal English faculty offices in McDonough 477.
*Sadly was unable to attend the Global Legal Skills Conference in Nottingham, UK, July 30-Aug 1, which some attendees have shared was really fantastic. But hoping to attend the 2024 GLS Conference in Barri, Italy.
*Fortunate to have had a family vacation in July in a small town (Puerto Morelos) on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which was a very positive linguistic experience and first time out of the US for my children.
Prof. Dundon presenting at University of Bialystok
Prof. Dundon gave a presentation titled Approaching Legal English through Transactional Law, which summarized the way that his current class on Contract Drafting at Georgetown Law combines substantive instruction about contract drafting with practice in a number of legal English skills (e.g., adapting language from precedent contracts, explaining contractual changes in ordinary English, and writing professional emails). He walked the audience through his syllabus, course materials, and one of the units from the course.
Questions afterwards related to ways that the course could be adapted to classes in programs that are not overtly US-law focused, as well as different ways to combine expertise from both lawyers and linguists in a single classroom.
Prof. Dundon in Warsaw
Other presentations at the conference related to legal English instruction in a variety of educational and institutional contexts, legal translation, the Plain English movement, and the work of multilingual lawyers in Europe.
Overall it was a fascinating conference, and Prof. Dundon felt very lucky to attend.
In the second semester of our Legal English course at Georgetown Law in the Two-Year LLM Program, we focus on criminal procedure cases. More specifically, Miranda rights including the concepts of custody and interrogation.
This Saturday Night Live comedy sketch seems to be a unique example that somehow sits at the intersection of criminal procedure, language learning, and humor, parodying the way many of us “learned” Spanish in school growing up in the US. And really, parodying the way many of us learned any language in school growing up. Enjoy!
My 2-Year LLM Program Legal English colleagues Prof. Ben Cheng and Prof. John Dundon and I have been “doing” legal English for a good while now. We know how to speak, write, and generally communicate in culturally sensitive and appropriate ways. We know how to grade our speech for multilingual learners. And it’s second nature to adjust our communications to factor in or address any potential gaps in our students’ US cultural knowledge.
But we still make mistakes.
The latest comes from the big issue-spotter question on the spring final exam for our students. The topic was criminal procedure. More specifically, Miranda rights and when a person is “in custody” and when a police officer is subjecting an individual to “interrogation.”
Georgetown Law and its Two-Year LLM Program students are fortunate to have Applied Linguistics expert Prof. Heather Weger on the faculty to help multilingual law students with their writing skills.
Prof. Heather Weger
This week Prof. Weger, who holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, held a Grammar- Focused Workshop to introduce students to specific strategies to improve their self-editing skills. Self-editing is a notoriously difficult skill to develop, and students benefit from tailored support and direct practice. In Prof. Weger’s words, “My goal is to help students engage with their language choices so that they can express their thoughts and personality with clarity and confidence.”
The workshop had two components: (1) A hands-on review activity to review strategies to correct clause-level errors and write more concisely and (2) a Grammar Review Workbook with several self-diagnostic and self-study activities The workbook, created by Prof. Weger, was designed with input from the Legal English team and tailored for students in the Two-Year LL.M. program.
Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English, with special thanks to Prof. Julie Lake and Prof. Heather Weger for their time and linguistics expertise in analyzing and discussing the texts and editing this post, which is far more cohesive because of them.
Hot on the heels of my recent experiment to try and better understand ChatGPT’s view of improving language and grammar (See “Analyzing ChatGPT’s ability as a grammar fixer,” 2/23/23), I was grading my students’ timed midterm exams and noticed a paragraph in one students’ answer that had all the right pieces but decidedly lacked cohesion.
“….the biggest takeaway of all for this experiment…..ChatGPT can help instructors identify the kinds of cohesive devices that a student is not using and then support the student in learning to use and become more comfortable and familiar with those cohesive devices.”
So I mentioned this in a comment and gave some suggestions as to how to improve the cohesion in the paragraph. And then I had a thought:
Prof. Dundon’s talk, titled “Challenging monolingual ideology in the U.S. judicial systems: A proposal for multilingual courts,” focused on one of the many intersections between law and linguistics.
I recently tried a simple yet potentially helpful ChatGPT activity with my LLM students to (a) build individual grammar awareness, (b) build a better understanding of the benefits and limitations of using ChatGPT to fix one’s grammar, and (c) gain a better understanding of what happens grammatically when ChatGPT is asked to fix grammar.
The Process:
As part of the Legal English II course (which teaches US case reading and analysis via a series of Supreme Court decisions about Miranda rights to students in Georgetown Law’s 2-Year LLM program), my students were required to write an essentially IRAC-style answer in response to a fact pattern under timed conditions.
Afterwards, as an assignment, I asked my students to input their essay into ChatGPT with the instruction to “Please fix any language issues in this essay:“
Students then had to compare the two versions of their essay and write a short analysis or commentary on what they noticed, what ChatGPT did/didn’t do well, how they felt about it, etc. I told students to either put the two versions in a table so they could compare the language side by side, or they could do a use the redline/track changes function to show the differences.
I next reviewed the students’ submissions myself. And I then invited two Georgetown Legal English colleagues with PhDs in applied linguistics–Prof. Julie Lake and Prof. Heather Weger–to review the student submissions and then have a group discussion about what we noticed.
Upon additional consideration (and inspired by a suggestion from Jack Kenigsberg, a former Hunter MA TESOL classmate), I took one paragraph from one student’s essay and fed it into ChatGPT with the instruction: “Fix any grammar errors in the quoted text. For each change you make, explain why you made the change.” And after it provided its answer, I clicked “Regenerate response” to create a second response to see what (if anything) came out different a second time.
The Takeaways:
The main takeaways by my students, my colleagues and myself were:
