Connecting Language and Disciplinary Knowledge in English for Specific Purposes

Case Studies in Law

Alissa J. Hartig

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783098507
• eBook ISBN: 9781783098521
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Englisch

How are language and disciplinary knowledge connected in the English for Legal Purposes (ELP) classroom, and how far should ELP practitioners go in supporting students' acquisition of the conceptual frameworks that shape the genres they are learning? This book presents a pedagogical model for incorporating these conceptual frameworks into disciplinary language instruction and follows four focal participants as they learn to read and write new genres in a second language and disciplinary culture. By examining not just students' written texts, but also their reading practices and interactions in class and in tutoring sessions, the book traces the ways in which disciplinary knowledge and language interact as students develop academic literacy in a new disciplinary community. Throughout the book, the discipline of law is used as a lens for examining broader connections between language, culture and disciplinary knowledge, and their relevance for English for Specific Purposes and writing in the disciplines.

1Introduction

‘What’s a Concept?’

This question came up in class during my first semester as a graduate student, and it has remained with me ever since. In many ways, it was this question that led to the study described in this book. About a year after beginning to think about the role of concepts in language instruction, I started working as a language specialist with international graduate students in law. As I sat in on legal writing classes, I heard over and over again that the primary goal of such courses was to help students to ‘think like a lawyer.’ In my work with students, it became clear that discipline-specific conceptual frameworks played an important role not just in their subject matter knowledge, but also in their ability to make sense of language use in the genres that they were learning to read and write. Different ways of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ shaped learners’ approaches to looking at legal texts.

It seemed that these students were learning at least two different types of disciplinary concepts in their law courses. One category of concepts included the kinds of terms that are typically found in legal vocabulary lists and are recognizable as key terms even by those outside the field, such as mens rea or proximate cause. These kinds of terms, which can be described as discourse-relevant concepts, are typically associated with students’ knowledge of legal doctrine and appear overtly in legal texts. A second category of concepts, however, played a more subtle role in students’ learning. These included concepts that students were briefly introduced to at the beginning of their studies, such as the notion of precedent or reasoning by analogy, but which continued to come up implicitly in the structure of a wide range of classroom interactions, writing tasks and reading assignments. Although this second category of concepts shaped the discourse used throughout this instructional context, they were often not mentioned overtly. For a number of students, it was this second category, discourse-structuring concepts, that was more challenging.

This book argues that discourse-structuring concepts can be a useful tool in the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and academic literacy more broadly, as well as a lens for research. The book presents a pedagogical model for incorporating such concepts into disciplinary language instruction and follows four focal participants as they learn to read and write new genres in a second language and disciplinary culture. By examining not just students’ written texts, but also their reading practices and interactions in class and in tutoring sessions, the book traces the ways in which disciplinary knowledge and language interact as students develop academic literacy in a new disciplinary community.

From Subject Matter Knowledge to Disciplinary Knowledge

Various models of genre and disciplinary writing development have explored relationships between subject matter knowledge and writing development in specific disciplines. Tardy (2009), for example, shows how formal, process and rhetorical knowledge connect with subject matter knowledge, becoming ‘increasingly integrated with growing expertise – inseparably so’ (Tardy, 2009: 22) as learners develop their genre knowledge. Similarly, Beaufort’s (2007) model of discourse community knowledge identifies connections among subject matter knowledge, genre knowledge, writing process knowledge and rhetorical knowledge, describing these components as ‘interrelated and interactive’ (Beaufort, 2007: 143).

The way that subject matter knowledge is defined across models varies, however. Writing about general composition instruction, Jolliffe (1995) characterizes subject matter knowledge as the general topic area addressed in a text. Tardy (2009: 22) describes it as ‘knowledge of the relevant content’ within a given field. Beaufort (2007), however, highlights two separate components of subject matter knowledge: factual knowledge and conceptual knowledge. She further describes critical thinking as a part of subject matter knowledge, characterizing this as ‘knowing how to frame the inquiry, what kinds of questions to ask or analytical frameworks to use in order to “transform” or inscribe documents with new meanings(s)’ (Beaufort, 2007: 19).

In this book, I use disciplinary knowledge to indicate this latter form of subject matter knowledge. I do so in order to emphasize its role not just as a source of content within disciplinary texts, but also as an expression of disciplinary epistemology. This approach further aligns with other perspectives on disciplinary writing. Considering instructor comments relating to argument and structure, for example, Lea and Street (1998: 162) argue that

what makes a piece of student writing ‘appropriate’ has more to do with issues of epistemology than with the surface features of form to which staff often have recourse when describing their students’ writing. That is to say, underlying, often disciplinary, assumptions about the nature of knowledge affected the meaning given to the terms ‘structure’ and ‘argument.’

In a similar vein, Dressen-Hammouda (2008: 238) discusses this kind of subject matter knowledge in terms of symbolic genres, or

unexpressed patterns for seeing, interpreting, knowing or being that individuals come to embody within their disciplinary identity and share as a result of collectively carrying out the activities of their community. Practitioners rely on these symbolic genres to elaborate the visible materialized genres – linguistic, visual, graphic, gestural, or behavioral – they use to communicate with one another

Similarly, Duff (2010: 170) argues that ‘identity work and the negotiation of institutional and disciplinary ideologies and epistemologies are core aspects of the production and interpretation of academic discourse.’ These approaches, which range from ESP to academic literacies to language socialization, all highlight ways in which disciplinary knowledge comes to represent more than just content. Disciplinary knowledge includes ways of seeing, communicating and doing that are specific to a discipline.

Moving from Content to Concepts

While the idea of connecting language and disciplinary content in English language teaching is not new (see, e.g. Brennan & Van Naerssen, 1989; Brinton et al., 1989; Bruce, 2002; Fortanet-Gómez & Räisänen, 2008; Lyster, 2007; Swain, 2001), distinguishing among the types of disciplinary knowledge that are most relevant for language teaching has been less fully explored. There is often a tension between language and content in ESP, with distinctions made between ‘carrier content’ and ‘real content’ (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998), for example. From this perspective, the carrier content provides little more than a disciplinary context through which the ‘real’ content of the ESP curriculum, for example, language for describing processes or comparisons, can be transmitted to students. Similarly, writing about English for Legal Purposes, Howe (1993: 152) makes a distinction between two types of disciplinary content: (1) factual and linguistic knowledge and (2) the knowledge of disciplinary concepts. She goes on to caution that ‘if we stray into the territory of legal concepts, then we are on lawyers’ land, and must beware’ (Howe, 1993: 152).

If we take the perspective on disciplinary knowledge outlined above, however, there seems to be a need for ESP practitioners and others who support students’ disciplinary discourse socialization to attend to the conceptual frameworks that shape the genres students are learning. This book offers an attempt to do so through the lens of discourse-structuring concepts, drawing on principles of concept-based instruction (CBI) from sociocultural theory (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006) and tracing the path of four focal participants as they learn to read and write new genres in a second language and legal culture. Throughout the case studies, this sociocultural theoretical lens sheds light not just on how the texts learners produce change over the course of the term, but also how this is linked to a deeper trajectory of navigating new forms of disciplinary knowledge.

Addressing Misconceptions about Multilingual Legal Writers

This book also grew out of a need to address problematic assumptions about language and culture that I encountered in some parts of the legal education community. I found that discussions of international law graduates too often framed their first languages and professional experience as a liability rather than as a resource. These beliefs surfaced in subtle ways, such as when students were told not to use their L1 when taking notes in class or when they were scolded for using their L1s in social conversations or study groups with their peers. In an extreme formulation of these beliefs, Lewinbuk (2008: 10) argues that ‘successful lawyers cannot think in different languages.’ She asserts that, to be successful:

First, the students need to commit to converting their entire thinking process into the native language of the country in which they are studying. Second, the students need to commit to converting their law-related thinking and writing into one that is acceptable in the legal community in which they are studying. (Lewinbuk, 2008: 10–11)

In the same article, Lewinbuk (2008: 11–12) goes on to characterize second language acquisition (SLA) through these means as a relatively straightforward, purely cognitive process:

Over time their brains will transition into mainly formulating their sentences in the native language of the country in which they are studying instead of their native languages. Their vocabularies will grow and they will slowly be liberated from language-related limitation of expression. […] If they are able to do so, their professional communication will likely become indistinguishable from attorneys who are native speakers.

The author advocates eliminating the use of languages other than English and having multilingual law students watch movies and listen to music in English as a way of fostering immersion.

In a later article, Spanbauer and Lewinbuk (2008–2009: 250) claim that their proposed method for cross-cultural legal instruction, including the use of children’s literature and storytelling to link broad cultural values to legal texts, ‘accomplish[es] something linguists and other theorists advocate as necessary – immersion, via which acculturating individuals avoid using their native language dictionaries or even communicating in their native language during their period of conversion to proficiency in a new language.’ As readers in applied linguistics will undoubtedly note, these characterizations of SLA stand at odds with most current work in the field. Neither flooding learners with linguistic input in whatever form is readily available nor enforcing a strict separation between languages is necessary or sufficient for fostering students’ development of the kinds of disciplinary literacy that are needed for graduate-level legal education.

Another view that pervades many discussions of L2 law students is the idea that they must shift not only from one clearly bounded linguistic system into another, but also from one discrete cultural system into another. This position is often justified by referencing work such as Nisbett’s (2003) Geography of Thought or Hofstede’s (1980) value-orientations framework, citing differences related to individualist–collectivist binaries and other similar categories. The approach described in Spanbauer and Lewinbuk (2008–2009) above, which advocates a monolingual and monocultural classroom environment for international law students, illustrates this perspective.

Spanbauer and Lewinbuk (2008–2009) ground their approach on the idea that ‘contradictory or conflicting meaning systems “cannot simultaneously guide cognition”’ (2008–2009: 232). The internal quotation here comes from a priming study by Hong et al. (2000), which the authors rely on for a large part of their theoretical grounding. Hong et al. (2000) look at whether ‘Westernized’ English-Chinese bilingual Hong Kong college students would use more collectivist or individualist explanations to describe a picture of one fish swimming in front of a group of other fish after being primed with images of either Chinese or American cultural icons (a picture of a dragon together with the character

(zhong, the first syllable in the word ‘China’:

), the Forbidden City and Confucius; or an American flag, the White House and Abraham Lincoln). In the study, no information is given regarding the languages used in the task prompts, the languages used by participants, or any specific data showing whether or not the participants had previously had significant contact with American culture, or even whether the participants considered themselves to be bicultural. The rationale behind choosing American rather than British cultural icons is also left unexplained, despite Hong Kong’s historical relationship with the UK.

Spanbauer and Lewinbuk (2008–2009) use this study to generalize more broadly to international students studying law in the United States, arguing that these students must be similarly primed with general American cultural concepts in a monolingual English environment in order to facilitate their adoption of ‘American’ forms of legal reasoning and overall cultural integration. The American cultural concepts that Spanbauer and Lewinbuk advocate for incorporating into the curriculum are all linked to what they refer to as ‘American exceptionalism’ (2008–2009: 235), adopting Alexis de Tocqueville’s formulation, which they describe as ‘a core system of uniquely American qualities, values, and beliefs consisting of “individualism, egalitarianism, and a readiness to pursue disputes through litigation”’ (2008–2009: 235). They go on to cite five other ‘uniquely American’ qualities from other sources, namely ‘liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire’ (2008–2009: 235).

Legal Cultures, Disciplinary Knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1: Language, Literacy and Disciplinary Knowledge
• Part 2: Case Studies
• Part 3: Addressing Connections between Language and Disciplinary Knowledge
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• References
• Index