Soft skills and mediation in legal English:Towards a new methodological approach in ESP
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper argues that one of the central components of ESP courses, as revealed by the process of ‘transferred needs analysis’ (Chovancová 2014), consists of soft skills. Those go beyond fluency of speech and accuracy of terminology since they involve the students’ ability to effectively communicate and negotiate in work-related professional contexts. This is particularly acute in the area of law where a significant amount of work consists of legal professionals mediating technical information to lay people. Identifying this situation as ‘intralanguage translation’ or ‘mediation’ (CEFRL), the paper presents several activities for developing this area of soft skills and demonstrates that this approach combines several desirable effects that range from the use of authentic materials, presentation of believable scenarios and practice of reformulation rather than verbatim reproduction of discipline-specific content (such as citing acts and regulations). |