Difficulties of Learning English for Specific Purposes: The Case of Law Faculty Students
Key Words: English for Specific Purposes, English for Legal Purposes, Difficulties of Learning, Law Terminology
PROCEEDINGS OF 8th INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ISSUES CONFERENCE
Faculty of Law , Tishk International University
Date:1-2. February 2024
Venue: Kurdistan Region- Erbil
ISBN: 979-8-9890269-1-3
———————————————————————–———————————————————————–——————————–
Mustafa Bingol
Faculty of Law, Tishk International University, Erbil, Iraq
Recep Bilgin
English Language Teaching Department, Faculty of Education, Tishk International University, Erbil, Iraq
———————————————————————–———————————————————————–——————————–
Abstract
English for specific purposes is a term that was introduced for the teaching of English in professional fields, especially after World War II. Accordingly, English for legal purposes aims to teach the indented terms of English in the field of law. Therefore, just as the curriculum has been developed for these purposes, books have also been designed. However, there are some difficulties in teaching this aspect of English specific to professionals. In order to determine what these difficulties are, a Likert scale survey was conducted to students of the Faculty of Law studying at Tishk International University. Student complaints and teachers’ suggestions were taken into account when determining the points where students had difficulty and placing them in the questionnaire. This survey, classified accordingly, was conducted on 103 students and the results were evaluated with the inferential statistics method. As a result, it has been observed that students have difficulty in learning legal English, especially because the legal language of English is quite different and does not correspond to their own practices at many points.
REFERENCES
Alcaraz, E., & Hughes, B. (2014). Legal translation explained. Routledge.
Askehave, I., & Swales, J. M. (2001). Genre identification and communicative purpose: A problem and a possible solution. Applied linguistics, 22(2), 195-212.
Belcher, D. (2009). What ESP is and can be: An introduction. In D. Belcher (ed.), English for Specific Purposes in Theory and Practice (pp. 1 – 20). University of Michigan Press.
Benvenisti, E. (2002). Sharing transboundary resources: International law and optimal resource use (Vol. 23). Cambridge University Press.
Berman, P. S. (2004). From international law to law and globalization. Colum. J. Transnat’l L., 43, 485.
Cao, D. (2007). Translating law (Vol. 33). Multilingual Matters.
Chujo, K., & Genung, M. (2004). Comparing the three specialized vocabularies used in ‘business English,’TOEIC, and British National Corpus spoken business communications. Practical English Studies, 2004(11), 1-15.
Donadio, P. (2019). Special languages vs. languages for special purposes: What’s in a name? International Journal of Language Studies, 13(4), 31-42.
Islam, M. (2015). The differences and similarities between English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for General Purposes (EGP) teachers. Journal of Research in Humanities, 51(01), 1-11.
Johns, A. M. (2013). The history of English for specific purposes research. In B. Paltridge & S. Starfield (Eds.), The handbook of English for specific purposes (pp. 5-30). Wiley-Blackwell.
Lesiak-Bielawska, E. D. (2015). Key aspects of ESP materials selection and design. English for Specific Purposes World, 46, 1-26.
Marín, M. J. (2014). Evaluation of five single-word term recognition methods on a legal English corpus. Corpora, 9(1), 83-107.
Menski, W. F. (2006). Comparative law in a global context: the legal systems of Asia and Africa. Cambridge University Press.
Northcott, J. (2009). Teaching legal English: Contexts and cases. English for specific purposes: Theory and practice, 165-185.
Northcott, J. (2012). Legal English. The handbook of English for specific purposes, 213-226. doi:10.1002/9781118339855.ch11
Salmani-Nodoushan, M. A. (2020). English for specific purposes: Traditions, trends, directions. Studies in English Language and Education, 7(1), 247-268.
SEKHRI, O. (2020). The Relation between ESP and GE and their Effect on Designing the Courses among Teachers of English in Departments of Constantine 1 University. International Arab Journal of English for Specific Purposes, 3(1), 53-66.
Tiersma, P. M. (1999). Legal language. University of Chicago Press.
Tiililä, U. (2018). 20 Legal discourse as an example of domain-specific science communication. Languages for special purposes: An international handbook, 381.
Ződi, Z. (2019). The limits of plain legal language: understanding the comprehensible style in law. International Journal of Law in Context, 15(3), 246-262.