New Students and Some Useful Resources

Good news for the school. Three enthusiastic lawyers have just signed up for a short programme of learning Legal English. They are interesting and interested, the two qualities above all that make teaching enjoyable. A bonus, for me, is that they are public interest lawyers so my area of speciality is going to be particularly useful. For more about public interest law have a look at the PILI website: http://www.pili.org/



On another note, many thanks to Jeremy Day for posting his tip for making a vocabulary exercise with tables (see http://specific-english.blogspot.com/2009/10/vocabulary-revision-with-table-and.html ). I needed a quick exercise to assess the vocabulary of my three new clients and, using Jeremy's idea I made up a word matching kit much more quickly than I imagined. It was very successful with the clients and, at least in part, persuaded them sign up.

Looking for a quick source of legal expressions, I came across some free guides at http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/ including a glossary of legal terms. Incidentally, another useful resource is http://www.write-better-english.com/better-legal-writing.aspx

Language of Law Conference

Here, a little later than I had intended, is something about City University London’s Language of the Law conference in association with Taylor Wessing and The English Project that I attended on 13th October. Other than to say how interesting it was and what a pleasure it was to catch up with my old friend, Professor Chris Mulvey, I can do no better than to post the link to the City University's page, which includes a video of all of the speakers. If you have time I thoroughly recommend watching/listening to it.

http://www.city.ac.uk/whatson/2009/10_oct/131009_languageoflaw.html

The friendly world of legal English

Just a quick note before I go to the airport: I am rapidly discovering that there is a very supportive group of fellow teachers of legal English, many of them in Europe. I've added some of the blog addresses below. In this competetive world it is a pleasure to see how people in this field are not at all jealous of their ideas and materials - I'd mention in particular Jeremy Day at http://specific-english.blogspot.com/ who has just been kind enough to mention this blog in his latest post. When I get back from the UK I shall be following Jeremy's lead and doing a post on available blogs and other useful links that might be of use to other practitioners

English Language Day

I'm off to London for a series of events to mark English Language Day. The following from http://www.englishproject.org/ explains all:

On 13 October 2009, the English Project will be coordinating the first ever English Language Day to celebrate one of the wonders of the world, the English Language. We hope it will be the first of many such annual events. Amazingly, although English is spoken by some 2 billion people on the planet, there is no day in the calendar when we can celebrate its full glory. Now there is. 13 October.

We have chosen this date because it was on 13 October 1362 that the Chancellor of England for the first time opened Parliament with a speech in English. In that same Parliament, a Statute of Pleading was approved that permitted members in debate to use the English language. It had become again an official language of law and law-making.

Because of this connection with law-making, our theme this year is the language of law in its widest sense. The English Project’s contribution to the Day will be three events hosted by London law firm Taylor Wessing, for schools, for university law students and for the public on our central theme.

I shall be going to all three language of law events and will follow up with an item on the blog next week.