Enhancing Legal English Skills for Law Students through Simulation-based Activities

Abstract

Legal English, a sub-type of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), is in demand for legal practitioners in a new area of global integration. Teaching legal English has been seen as a complicated yet interesting process due to its complex features (Kamolidinovna, 2021). Consequently, several modern and innovative teaching methods are proposed to facilitate students to strengthen their legal English skills. This empirical paper focalizes on law students’ viewpoints on the benefits of Simulation-based Activities (SbAs) in the legal English course; explores the efficiency of SbAs on students’ legal English aspects development; at the same time, it also reveals students’ obstacles when partaking in such activities. In order to achieve these aims, the study made use of a mixed-research approach with the assistance of the data collection instruments, namely survey questionnaires, interviews, paper-based tests and performance-based tests. The results revealed that the participants expressed the favorable perspectives towards the significance of SbAs in their legal English skills enhancement shown through high Mean values (M>=3.40). Also, integrating SbAs into teaching legal English brought about positive effects on students’ motivation, critical thinking, research and other soft skills despite a number of obstacles during the application process. Additionally, the values Sig.2-tailed tests of all variables indicate the statistical difference in students’ performance of the control and treatment groups. Accordingly, SbAs are highly recommended to effectively instruct learners to fulfill their legal English course properly.