Language pedagogy perspective for lawyers' intercultural communication

Abstract

Modern lawyers practising at the international level face various difficulties while communicating with their foreign colleagues. Such obstacles may have different grounds, including discrepancies in the communicators' backgrounds and world views. In order to mitigate these discrepancies, we need to provide an entirely new approach to teaching law students intercultural professional communication at master's level. The present research aims to substantiate the concept of communication-and-action-oriented needs as a culture-specific characteristic of language identity paying greater attention to the idea of lawyer's communication-and-action-oriented needs and identifying the course's effectiveness for teaching future lawyers intercultural professional communication in colliding legal cultures based on the concept mentioned above. The following course was carried out by the authors at the Law Institute of International Law and Justice at Moscow State Linguistic University among thirty-two master's degree students. The authors of the study employed both a descriptive research design and an explanatory research design. Also, an experimental research design was used to find out how successful the course results were. Collecting data included tests. The average scores showed that the students achieved better results after completing the course. The authors applied correlation analysis to assess the correlation between the students' achievements before and after completing the course. The results of the study show that lawyer's communication-and-action-oriented needs could provide a steady basis for modeling original content for teaching young lawyers to communicate with their counterparts from other legal cultures. Having analyzed different approaches to human needs' conceptualization, the authors specify that needs possess a unique descriptive potential that proves to combine both constant and variable features. Lawyer's professional needs are always realized through actual legal practices that are only existent and meaningful in the given cultural, social and legal settings. The conducted research provided the basis for modeling original content for teaching young lawyers and let the authors of the article work out the course for master's degree students. The work results can be helpful at any law school/university in Russia to provide high-quality education for law students in English.