Language learning is integral to practice-based legal education, and needs to be given more attention in research and course design. That’s the key message of my recently published article about “The value of participant feedback” in the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education.
Background
My contribution is a study of 72 feedback questionnaires completed in 2011 and 2012 by participants over two courses of an English-Mandarin bilingual legal education program in the People’s Republic of China that my team and I designed and ran. The program was called the Yilian Advocacy Training Tournament (YATT), or in Mandarin “义联杯”公益倡导竞技性训练项目(i.e. ‘Yilian Cup’ Public Interest Advocacy Training Project), and it was run by the legal aid centre where I then worked, a place called Beijing Yilian Legal Aid and Study Centre for Labor (北京义联劳动法援助与研究中心; Yilian Centre). I’ve previously written for Language on the Move about the tension between aid work and English teaching during my time at the NGO.
Members of the 2011 YATT team
What makes the YATT program worth studying is its atypical context: this is a Global South, civil-society-led, publicly interested, practical legal education program for university students. YATT thus provides a case for investigating important questions as to how novel forms of legal education are experienced and evaluated by participants, and whether civil-society-led legal education can extend our ideas of alternative forms of ‘clinical legal education’ (CLE), especially forms that may be adapted to contexts beyond the Global North. It is worth noting that participant experiences of CLE, particularly in the Global South, are under-represented topics in the CLE research literature.
An unexpected emphasis on language in the results
Particularly interesting from the interdisciplinary law and linguistics viewpoint is my finding that the themes of legal learning and language learning emerged together and as interrelated skills. Some of the skills which participants nominated as valuable may appear at first blush to be language rather than legal skills, such as speaking with both style and confidence, speaking clearly, organising ideas, responding quickly, using facial expressions and gestures, and adapting to being on stage or to being nervous. But lawyers (especially advocates) also rely heavily on these skills, in whichever language they use. It appears that YATT participants were particularly attuned to noticing improvements in these skills and providing feedback about them. I have suggested in the paper that this may be because YATT was offered bilingually and, for many, undertaken in their second language, and so language was on the participants’ minds.
Whatever the reason, these results can help illuminate something that seems to be somewhat invisible yet in plain sight: that the integration of communication skills with legal skills is one way most CLE around the world already distinguish themselves from lecture-based legal education.
The students and professional volunteers who participated in YATT in 2011 and 2012 perceived it not only as educational, but as practical and legally-relevant education incorporating real-world activities and personnel. The practical learning was what the participants valued most about YATT. The high value on the language learning aspects of YATT is part of this overall evaluation of practical learning within the YATT program.
The emphasis on the language learning theme in the participant responses also highlights the methodological value of seeking insider perspectives. This is an approach that my sociolinguistic studies, rather than my legal studies, have taught me. Because the literature on CLE rarely foregrounds language learning, there could be no content-directed theme about language learning arising from the research literature and then applied to the data analysis; the theme had to emerge from the data itself.
Learning to communicate is language learning
This YATT feedback serves as a reminder that legal practice is in many ways about communication, not only legal know-how, and furthermore that language and communication skills are a facet of a legal education that practice-based learning, more than doctrinal learning, can develop. Learning to communicate appropriately is at the core of practical legal training because communication practices are embedded in lawyering in “real world” contexts. An improved ability to express one’s thoughts, to be confident (authoritative, even), clear and quick off the mark, to effectively emphasise or clarify a message through body language and many of the other language skills that the YATT participants noted are “soft skills”, which law students should hope to develop. I argue that this holds even if CLE is undertaken in the students’ first language, in order to improve their ability to work with various clients and in court.
I therefore argue that practice-based language learning should be recognised and researched as an important part of experiential legal education and vocational legal training generally, and specifically of CLE. Communicative and linguistic skills are surely key aspects that CLE educators around the world hope students will learn through interacting and doing lawyering (for real or in mocked-up scenarios), all the more because these skills are not studied or practiced much in the law school classroom.
Nevertheless, when reviewing the literature I noted that legal education scholarship does not foreground this aspect of CLE, in contrast to the foregrounding of the language aspect from the internal perspective in my study. The relative invisibility of language and communication skills in CLE theory is not necessarily because these are unimportant in reality; the communication skills which the YATT participants felt they had beneficially practiced are recognisable as the stock in trade of good legal advocates and advisers. I suggest, rather, that the relative invisibility of language in legal education scholarship is the product of a disposition well-known in the sociolinguistic literature, namely, that non-linguists often mistakenly regard language as something that is simply there and “naturally” learnt and known.
This study gives an illustration of why there is a benefit to making language learning and linguistic research much more visible in legal education. Here, the context is clinical legal education, but there is surely value to be found by increasing the visibility of language learning and linguistic research across legal education. Dr Laura Smith-Khan and I have made this broader point before on Language on the Move, e.g. when noting Prof Janet Ainsworth’s call at IAFL 2019 for scholars to deliberately communicate our research where it is most likely to influence positive change, and we have a related paper just out in the Alternative Law Journal.
References
Grey, A. (2020) ‘The value of participant feedback: Insights from learners in a novel, non-university CLE setting in China’, International Journal of Clinical Legal Education 27(2) (2020), 5-67.
Grey, A. and Smith-Khan, L. (2020). ‘Bringing linguistic research into legal scholarship and practice’. Alternative Law Journal.
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Hi GS. I have not argued that good communication is necessarily based on knowledge of a language or on words alone. I have argued that communication skills are part of learning to use a language well, and that participants were very pleased to have both language and communication skills foregrounded in their practice-based legal education activities.
Moreover, advocacy skills are not the only skills of legal communication in question here.
I have also not argued that advocacy skills are entirely absent from legal education, but rather that language and communication skills are (a) not a priority in the theory or empirical research on CLE, based on an extensive literature review, and (b) that language skills are not necessarily foregrounded by educators, either. They could be made much more visible to students and designed much more deliberately into practice-based and clinical legal activities.
Dear Alexandra,
I am not a specialist in socio-linguistics so I don’t want to comment further. but saying that good communication is part of using a language well is very problematic- we know for a fact that are several biases when it comes to communication in both social and legal contexts ( and especially in a courtroom context). So who decides that communication is good? We know that judging communication is subject to race , gender. class ( the list can go on) biases . Yes, there may not be priority to language skills in CLE in the way you expect because language is not considered a separate domain from the practice of law. Based on my own practical experience I do not agree that language and communication skills are not foregrounded by educators in the context of CLE – this includes the Global South. It’s a different matter how far things are implemented.
I find this article troubling as good communication is not necessarily based on knowledge of a language but other skills which involve interpersonal competence and histrionics ( usage of body language is a moot point). Being an effective speaker and convincing your audience does not involve linguistic competence -Donald Trump is an illustration of the same
The author is wrong that advocacy skills are ignored in legal education ( perhaps this is an issue in Australian law schools). As someone in legal education I can assure you that advocacy skills are extremely important and are intertwined with substantive aspects of law along with practice- based aspects such as the audience /judges.