A New Paradigm in Croatian Higher Education: Non – Formal Foreign Language Learning

Abstract

Knowledge of legal English, with English as lingua franca of international communication, has become an essential precondition for communication of legal professionals worldwide. That is the reason why law students and legal professionals in Europe, especially those working in new member states of the EU, are interested in widening their knowledge in legal English within different forms of non-formal foreign language education. In this paper, the author presents a new paradigm of foreign language teaching at Croatian universities that was introduced due to recent changes in professional communication, the intensive development of IT, and the growing importance of English in the international context. The objective of the paper is to present examples of good practice and innovation in teaching LSP in Croatian higher education. The challenges of professional communication in the field of law are presented and discussed in the introduction of the paper. In the main part, the types of nonformal education are presented that were developed at the Faculty of Law Osijek, Croatia as a response to requirements of the EU labor market and the professional communication between lawyers. The first nonformal type of education presented in the paper is the Lifelong Learning Programme for Lawyer Linguists, and the second one is the course Legal English for Civil Servants developed within the European cross-border project CATCH, organized by Croatian and Hungarian units of local and regional self-government. In the conclusion, the author discusses the achievements of the two programs and offers her vision of the future developments in foreign language teaching at European higher education institutions.