Shifting frames to construct a Legal English class

Abstract

In the last decade or so, EAP courses for international lawyers have proliferated. To date, there has been very little research investigating the teaching and learning that takes place in these classrooms, and the present research seeks to fill this gap. This article examines how an EAP course offered at a U.S. law school may foster international students' socialization into the U.S. legal academic community. Using classroom interaction data, this study centers on how one professor and her students “talk into being” (Heritage, 1984) a Legal English class by frequently shifting between the interactive frames (Bateson, 1972; Goffman, 1986; Tannen & Wallat, 1987) of “law class” and “ESL class,” as cued by linguistic and paralinguistic features produced during classroom talk. Course evaluations and semi-structured interviews with students suggest that repeated shifts between the two frames may play a role in the discursive construction of a class that meets the linguistic and academic needs of students, who seek not only to enhance their “general linguistic competence” (Hutchinson & Waters, 1980), but also to increase their language proficiency for academic tasks they can expect to complete in a U.S. law class.