Identifying spoken technical legal vocabulary in a law school classroom

Abstract

Technical legal vocabulary creates a significant learning burden for initiates to legal English, the lingua franca of international commerce and the language of law schools within the U.S. This study, focusing on spoken texts, sought to identify and describe technical legal vocabulary used in one first-year, foundational law school course: Contracts. A keyword list based on course transcripts was created using the corpus comparison method. Additionally, Language-related episodes (LREs) were used as a qualitative framework to describe explicit attention to language within classroom discussions. LREs frequently contained definitions of technical legal vocabulary and highlighted the polysemous nature of technical legal vocabulary. The keyword (corpus comparison) method was found to be less time-consuming for identifying technical legal vocabulary and to provide better, albeit somewhat limited, coverage of the course transcripts than the qualitative coding method. However, qualitative coding provided rich descriptions of how definitions and technical vocabulary are discussed and conceptualized in a law school classroom.