CONTENT OF THE ENGLISH COURSE AT LAW UNIVERSITIES: NEW ASPECTS

Lysytska Olena

(Kharkiv, Ukraine)

The expansion of international contacts entails the question of improving the quality of the educational process in foreign languages and about finding new, more effective methods and techniques for teaching law students. This task can be accomplished by solving the problem of the correlation of general language training with a professionally oriented one. It is also necessary to use an adequate ratio of teaching reading and teaching oral speech in non-language faculties.

It should be noted that despite the critical attitude to school training of foreign languages, the level of preparedness of graduates who enter law faculties is much higher today than before. Students who enter the law faculty have a rather high motivation to learn a foreign language. This fact facilitates a number of difficulties faced by teachers of a foreign language in a law school, and which are associated with limiting the study of the English language to only one course.

In order to achieve the maximum effect in teaching foreign languages ​​at law schools, general linguistic and specific professional language training from the first days of study at the university should be carried out in an integrated manner, and the content of training should involve reading authentic texts from the very beginning of the course, as well as using them as a means of teaching skills of oral speaking. In the aspect of development of oral and speech skills, the particular texts should be selected, not only those that are full of professional terms and elements of jurisprudence, but also professionally oriented texts for teaching students oral and verbal communication in special legal scenarios. These types of texts occur very seldom in modern books.

The elements of jurisprudence in the whole course of teaching English should be systemic in nature and be chosen so that it represents the basic legal sciences (criminal law, international law, civil law, etc.). From the first to the last lesson, the entire educational activity of a student should be related to the legal sphere.

The content of teaching English to law students should include the ability to work independently with authentic texts and knowledge of professionally-oriented situations, and students' communicative competence should be also professionally oriented. That is, communicative competence training should take place in the context of the development of professional competence of a law student. Acquiring communicative skills will contribute to the development of key qualifications in planning and organizing students’ activities and engaging them into collective interaction. Achieving such competence will require various educational technologies and the techniques of mental work.

The distinctive feature of mastering language material by law students is the constant updating of the lexical material used, which makes ineffective orienting to vocabulary minima only, although the creating and using of such basic vocabulary is necessary in the student groups of low level of knowledge.

Analysis of disciplines revealed the fact that students from the moment of entering the university are fairly well oriented in the issues of constitutional law, are familiar with basic concepts of ​​civil procedure, administrative and criminal law, law enforcement agencies, are aware of rhetoric, logic, construction of statements, argumentation and controversy. An applicant who enters a law faculty has a much greater amount of knowledge about his future specialty than those who have chosen other specialties. Watching crime movies, in which court cases play a crucial role, as well as reading detective literature, introduces the future lawyer to a variety of basic concepts of jurisprudence. Another specific feature of the legal specialty is that there is no obstacle for undergraduate students to understand the subject-semantic content of legal concepts that are learnt in legal courses in the subsequent years of study. That is why reading textual material, and the ability to talk is not a problem and should be an integral and necessary type of activity at the English lessons of first-year law students. The American and British institutions, their legal bases and functioning, and various sets of laws and certain outstanding documents are not difficult to understand and appropriate for mastering reading and developing oral speech on legal topics.

In order to prepare the future law student for a discussion on the issues that make up the content of his professional training, it is necessary to select a set of texts on the law, that will allow forming pragmatic skills. They would give the student the opportunity to navigate the literature in the specialty.

References:

1. Information and communication technologies in education (No date). Retrieved October 10, 2017 from the World Wide Web: [electronic resource, access:http://iite.unesco.org/pics/publications/ru/files/3214728.pdf]

2. Rychen D.S. Developing key competencies in education: some lessons from international and national experience / Rychen, Dominique Simone. Tiana, Alejandro. –Paris, France : International Bureau of Education, 2004. –80 p.