Grantee Research
Teaching Legal Analysis Through the Lens of Second Language Pedagogy: A Consciousness-Raising Approach
Document Type
Law Review Article
Publication Date
2025
Keywords
teaching methods
Abstract
Even though law professors are not ostensibly language instructors, we are teaching our students how to use a specialized form of language. Law students learn new terminology, discourse structures, analytic frameworks, and pragmatic conventions for communicating with each other, their professors, and other legal professionals. By virtue of being in law school, students undergo a process of “language socialization” and develop culturally appropriate ways of communicating through the myriad spoken and written interactions they have with more proficient members of the legal discourse community.
If law students are learning a new language (of sorts), it follows that language teaching methodology can guide how we teach them, and especially how we teach the skills that underlie legal reading, writing, and analysis. The premise of this article is that law faculty can successfully borrow methods and approaches from language pedagogy, as informed by research in second language acquisition (SLA), a vibrant area of linguistics dedicated to the study of how people learn a second language.
One common approach to second language instruction is consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising enables students to learn language rules by solving problems about language, often in pairs or small groups. Consciousness-raising tasks might ask students to fill in the gaps of an incomplete text with a word or phrase, place jumbled sentences in order, or evaluate the appropriateness of a word or sentence within a paragraph. Consciousness-raising is a form of guided “discovery learning” that is not unique to the language teaching context; however, it is especially well-suited to second language learning. Research suggests that students who solve language problems are more actively engaged in the learning process, which can promote a deeper understanding of the target language. In addition, because language problem-solving tasks require students to communicate with each other using the very language which they must also learn, language acquisition is doubly enhanced.
