O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
A Short Description of the Current Research
The Legal English has rapidly become the most common language for business, law, and 
politics. Legal English (LE)) has its own specific terminology. For example, the words like 
attorney, barrister, brief, case, contract, evidence, guilty, judge, jury, lawsuit, sentence, 
plead, solicitor, sue, trial, verdict are found in the courtroom. Those legal vocabularies 
are also frequently used in the legal arena to draft, interpret or deal with legal 
documents and legal proceedings. Lawyers in general and Lebanese ones in particular 
have never learnt them before in their high schools. As a result, without having enough 
mastery of such Legal English terminology, it can't be feasible for them to use their 
English for reading, writing, listening, and speaking in the legal contexts. The need for 
the mastery of LE vocabularies certainly leads the teacher of legal English to think of how 
to develop and to utilize materials for teaching LE terminology interestingly and 
interactively.
 
English for Lawyers Intensive
class is intended for everybody who has a special interest 
in law and needs to use the legal English for their studies or work. The purpose of 
English 
for Lawyers Intensive
is to teach Lebanese speakers to comprehend and employ the 
language of the law in English. In particular, it aims to teach law students and lawyers 
how to select, interpret and utilize original legal materials of any kind in English in the 
course of their studies, research or work. Through an extensive variety of exercises 
based on authentic legal texts, participants will progressively learn the reading, 
vocabulary and study skills indispensable to work independently on legal materials of 
their own choice.
 
Practically speaking, the course material is devised to fulfill the needs of participants who 
would like to improve their oral and written legal English skills in order to advance in the 
workplace. The material is therefore appropriate for a 4-hour session a week held to 
provide the language support to the participants who are also in the process of 
embarking on postgraduate law degree or international legal English certificate (ILEC) 
and have had some experience of the way in which statutes are constructed. 
A terminology Video is a versatile educational tool utilized to motivate and teach EFL 
learners.
The legal English instructor has used the English for Lawyers legal videos to 
prompt the experimental group to improve their vocabulary acquisition and to eventually 
enhance their legal writings. 
In light of the above discussion, the hypotheses of the current study are as follows: 
 
H1: The use of legal terminology videos has a significant effect on the use of legal 
English in the writings of Lebanese lawyers 
H2: The use of legal terminology videos motivates Lebanese lawyers to write using 
legal English 
The present study was conducted with 16 Lebanese attorneys whose ages range between 
26 and 48 years old and assigned randomly to a control group (n=8) and an 
experimental group (n=8). The participants were enrolled in a course 
entitled English for 
Lawyers Intensive Class
and both, the experimental and control groups were taught by 
the same instructor.

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-47- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
The participants receive twelve four-hour-sessions of English for legal purposes. These 
attorneys, due to the emergence of e-contracts and international arbitration centers, are 
eager to develop their legal writing and speaking skills so that they become able to 
efficiently interpret the international jurisprudence and international law provisions and 
to fluently negotiate in writing and in speaking using legal English.
To investigate the first hypothesis, a pre-test and a post-test were conducted on both 
groups. The pre-test consisted of writing about a certain legal topic. The instruction was 
then carried out for 12 weeks. The instructor used legal texts, word banks, and role 
playing in both the control and the experimental groups. The only difference in 
instruction was that the instructor employed the legal terminology videos as the core 
material in the experimental group, where as she didn’t use any videos in the control 
group. At the end of the instructional period, a post test was administered to both groups 
in which the participants were asked to write about a legal topic. The mean scores of the 
pretest and posttest were then compared to examine if the use of legal terminology 
videos has a significant effect on the use of legal English or not. 
The instructor employed legal terminology videos
 
followed by word banks and role play 
presentations in the experimental group. Writing using word banks can be considered as 
a primary step to developing literacy. The practice of writing using word banks allows 
participants' language skills to grow. Employing the word banks won't only take place in 
oral situations as reading and writing will be a venue for the participants to express their 
thoughts while increasing verbal literacy in class while extending digital fluency. Because 
role play and employing word banks are a self
–
initiating and self
–
sustaining way to 
promote literacy, their implementation in educational settings is a crucial consideration. 
This began when the participants and the instructor discussed the terminology and 
phrases relating to a certain legal context conveyed through a specialized video and a 
legal text enriched with a legal word bank employed by both the video and the text; the 
participants were asked to deliver fluent and well-structured presentations by role 
playing situations rooted in legal context. Eventually, the writing assignment, the 
cornerstone of the role play, utilized the discussed legal text and the covered legal word 
bank. In addition, the participants had been always given the opportunity to logically and 
succinctly write anything other than the tailored assignment on condition that they would 
employ the legal Word Bank. All the subjects were always asked to work in groups in 
class in order to role play the context and the situations conveyed by the video and the 
legal text. With relevant audio-visual aids, the participants did think-pair and square , 
and then they wrote the scenario or the script of their presentations. Afterwards, they 
role played the script they prepared. The word banks vary in accordance with the 
covered topic. With respect to design and technique, the instructor employed the below 
session plan in the experimental group throughout 12 weeks.