COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES TO TEACHING LEGAL ENGLISH.

• Author: Badea, Codruta
• Position: Report

The word communication is used in daily contexts, usually, to mean speaking or writing or sending a message to another person. It involves ensuring that your message has reached the target audience and that the receiver understands and responds accordingly. It also involves ensuring that you are able to understand, interpret, and respond to messages. Communication is an important aspect of behavior. Human communication is affected by all factors that influence our environment. In the last sixty to seventy years, the study of human communication has been strengthened by contribution from many disciplines. Definitions, descriptions of the process, and analyses of the elements of communication have been developed by many scholars.

Communication is central to everything we do (in organizations, family, school/college, office, hobby group, community group, city/town). Consequently, our activities succeed or fail, and our goals are achieved or not achieved, according to our ability to communicate effectively with other members. It can strengthen a mutual sense of commitment; it also helps to bridge the gap between people who have misunderstandings. Indeed, communication plays a critical role in all phases of interpersonal relations, from creating relationships to maintaining them.

The continuous growing need for acquiring good communication skills in English has created a huge demand for worldwide English teaching. More and more learners wish to be able to master English to a high level of accuracy and fluency, thus enabling them to deal with a wide range of communicative situations and contexts. This has impacted on the quality of language teaching generating a diversification of language teaching resources, materials and strategies.

The teaching of ESP has generally been perceived as a separate field within ELT. Nevertheless, it has incorporated the emphasis on practical outcomes. Need is defined by the reasons which determine learners to acquire the desired language competences. From this perspective, ESP should take into consideration some important factors: ESP courses are designed to meet learners' specific needs and must be related in content to particular disciplines, professions/ occupations and activities. ESP is the language need for a particular academic subject and it includes the language structure, vocabulary, the particular skills needed (Jordan: 2012).

In Robinson's (1991) opinion, ESP courses are generally constraint by a limited time period in which the learners' goals have to be achieved and are taught in homogeneous classes in terms of the work or specialist studies that the students are involved in. The academic study of law, business, finance, public relations, etc. has become increasingly important nowadays, so minute attention should be paid to skills that are highly connect with their work environment. For example, some legal professionals need to read or write journal articles, to draft...