The September 2023 issue of AL Forum (the applied linguistics newsletter for TESOL) is out, thanks in part to contributions from several members of the Georgetown Law faculty. And the theme is language, teaching, and generative AI.
Co-edited by Georgetown Legal English ProfessorHeather Weger and George Washington Teaching Associate Professor Natalia Dolgova, it leads with a letter from the editors and includes two articles by Georgetown Law colleagues.
“In this issue, you will find leadership updates summarizing past and future ALIS activities, and this issue provides a closer look at how educators are grappling with the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as ChatGPT, on our field.”
“This article offers some resources and advice to consider as you make informed decisions about integrating AI into your workflows and prepare students to inhabit an AI-rich world.”
“A detailed case study of his experimental use of ChatGPT to design teaching materials for a vocabulary course, [including] examples of how to prompt ChatGPT to generate materials (e.g., quizzes and practice activities.)”
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.
I’m an experienced legal English teacher. Or at least I think I am. But how much do I really know about how LLM students (and other foreign-trained lawyers and law students) learn and improve their legal English? Probably not as much as the students and lawyers themselves.
This post is to try and help gather information directly from real learners about what has helped them learn and improve their legal English.
Questions
For any current, former or future LLM students and/or for any foreign-trained lawyer or law student who has ever tried to improve their legal English
1. What kinds of things have been most helpful to you in improving your legal English? For example, what strategies or tricks or adjustments or approaches? Our courses? Or books or podcasts? Or anything else in particular that you’d like to mention?
2. What, if anything, has not been helpful?
3. Of the helpful things, did they help more with the “legal” or more with the “English”?
4. What advice or suggestions or recommendations would you make for others trying to improve their legal English?
Please post your responses in the comments below. Or, if you prefer, you’re welcome to email your thoughts to me at sh1643@georgetown.edu and I can post them anonymously for you.
As a legal English professor in Georgetown’s 2-Year LLM Program and a “law & language” nerd, I greatly appreciate any efforts to analyze and identify concrete elements of legal writing that help distinguish the quality or genre of the writing. (See, e.g., some of my experiments with ChatGPT and legal writing as a grammar fixer and on cohesion.)
For my international LLM students, this kind of information can be exponentially more helpful to understand that, e.g., dependent clauses can help one’s legal analysis come across more cohesively, as opposed to suggestions to “Include more analysis” or “Be more concise.” A dependent clause is an objectively defined thing that you can hang a hat on. And even if a student doesn’t know what it is or how to recognize or construct it, it’s something that is very learnable.
I was therefore very excited to come across the below Twitter thread from UNLV Legal Writing Professor and Write.law founder Joe Regalia today, explaining that he was in the midst of a linguistic comparison involving 10 court opinions written by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (renowned for the quality of her writing) and 50 legal briefs written by various lawyers. In his tweets he shares some early observations from the analysis. Though alas, it’s just a teaser and it seems like we’ll have to wait for the full report or article to come out at some point to see the rest. If this were published as a book, I would be right there in the line outside Barnes & Nobles with all the other lawyer linguists waiting to get one of the first copies, a la Harry Potter mania.
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.
In the article, she proposes an idea that is not necessarily new to those teaching legal English or English for Academic Purposes. But it is likely new, and likely goes against the grain, for those in the US law school legal writing community.
The main point: There’s a whole other way to think about grammar than the way you probably learned to think about it. And it involves shifting to an understanding of grammar as one more rhetorical tool in a legal writer’s rhetorical toolbox, i.e., connecting grammar to communicative purpose, rather than viewing grammar as a series of pedantic, nitpicky rules to be followed for the sake of propriety.
Joe noted that even though he hasn’t even added sources yet to the draft chapter, he wanted to share in case any of the ideas are helpful to folks exploring using GPT in their classes.
