Corpus-bases Teaching: Addressing the Scarcity of Commercial Textbooks in English for Lawyer Subjects

Abstract

Informed by corpus-bases analysis (e.g. Carreon & Svetanant, 2017) and blended learning (e.g. Hou, 2014; Poole, 2011) frameworks, this research paper is aimed at answering three research questions: (1) What keywords characterize the legal news reported on Bangkok Post online?, (2) Has the use of the software AntConc 3.5.7 (Anthony, 2018) helped to improve students’ learning of legal English”, and (3) If yes, in what way has the use of AntConc 3.5.7 (Anthony, 2018) improved students’ learning of legal English? News reports written from January 2017 to August 2018, containing the words ‘case’ or ‘charge’, were gathered and combined to form a corpus. The corpus was used to demonstrate how to learn English vocabulary among 28 junior law students using the concordance, wordlist and keyword tools of the software AntConc 3.5.7. The findings revealed that keywords related to the law profession were abundant and varied and indicates that news reports are potential sources of supplemental materials for an ESP subject for law students. As for the use of the software, students claimed it was convenient and fun, an alternative/trendy way to learn English, useful to easily see patterns, and a practical tool since it can be used at home. For the specific ways the software helped in English language learning, the students reported that it was useful in learning basic and legal English vocabulary, helped them better understand English grammar, style of writing and English language use as whole.