Politeness in Lawyer’s Talk. Preparing Students of Law For Real Life Communication Through Case Studies from Commercial Law and Marketing.

KALLUS, Hana. Politeness in Lawyer’s Talk. Preparing Students of Law For Real Life Communication Through Case Studies from Commercial Law and Marketing. In EULETA conference (for lawyers and legal English teachers). 2022.

Basic information

• Original name: Politeness in Lawyer’s Talk. Preparing Students of Law For Real Life Communication Through Case Studies from Commercial Law and Marketing.
• Name (in English): Politeness in Lawyer’s Talk. Preparing Students of Law For Real Life Communication Through Case Studies from Commercial Law and Marketing.
• Authors: KALLUS, Hana.
• Edition: EULETA conference (for lawyers and legal English teachers), 2022.

Other information

• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Keywords (in Czech): zdvořilost právníků;případové studie;výsledky výzkumu
• Keywords in English: politeness in lawyer´s talk;case studies;research results

Abstract

The talk presented the general concept, methodology and first results of the sociolinguistic research prepared for future lawyers at the Faculty of Law in Brno, Czech Republic. The main aim of the research questionnaire with multiple choices prepared by the team is to discover how well students understand specific legal and linguistic nuances in meanings of statements and also their awareness of English politeness and modality. Primarily, we formed individual statements and options for three areas of investigation in the research questionnaire. In the first area, linguistic one, understanding of precise meaning of statements was measured via reformulations. The second area focused on understanding legal and economic concepts and finally communicative area measured sociolinguistic issues, such as proper understanding of politeness and modality. The method used for measuring these issues was based on Churchill’s concept for creating methods of measurement and was verified by using Cronbach Alfa coefficient. We used Likert’s scale for retrieving results. Our experience so far has uncovered substantial misunderstandings and wrong choices even among upper-intermediate and advanced students since the difference between English negative politeness and the way Czech speakers express themselves politely in English differ a lot. This research is a direct result of a new multidisciplinary course in English created by Czech teachers of marketing, corporate law, unfair competition and legal English. The main aim of the course is to develop students’ legal and communicative competences, soft skills in English and creative thinking through solving case studies from Czech law. The course and a sample of course materials were presented at the Euleta workshop in Krakow in 2019 and also described by Siti Jamil in a LinkedIn blog run by Louise Kulbicki. The effort to create a jointly taught course is in harmony with current trends of developing English for Academic Purposes (EAP) across disciplines, e.g. Dudle-Evans and St. John (1998), Jordan (1984, 1993 and 1996), Swales and Feak (2001). The multidisciplinary course thus enhances theoretical knowledge and its practical application on specific cases.