In this short article I intend to look at some of the idiosyncratic issues which characterise the emerging field of Legal English (hereafter LE) instruction vis-à-vis its more consolidated counterparts, such as Business or Technical English. In broad terms, the LE instructor does not only have to deal with the relevant grammatical and syntactical difficulties or draw the student’s attention to the terminological and phraseological conventions of the field. Ideally, the instructor should also aim to raise the learner’s awareness of the technical differences which hold between the legal systems at issue, for instance, in the case of the English-Spanish language pair. This task is all the more important if we bear in mind that most of the traditional reference tools —such as course books, dictionaries, grammars, etc.— fail to activate the students’ perception of the linguistic implications of this cross-cultural disparity.

Elsewhere (Pérez-González, 1999b) I have illustrated how concordances may be exploited in the legal ESP classroom in order to bridge some of the gaps between content matter and linguistic form. For one thing, concordances are able to respond to specific learner-generated questions. For another, they allow students to move from data to generalisation and learn to undertake their own research at different levels of language organisation. In doing so, students find it easier to incorporate their linguistic insights into their ongoing training and specialisation as future professionals of the law. In what follows, I will attempt to briefly lay down the rationale for the implementation of this computer-aided pedagogical tool.

Legal English is growing apace as a distinctive field of language instruction within the overall ESP scenario and assuming an increasingly high profile in Law degree programmes across European universities, particularly among those of EU member states. The globalisation of trading and commercial relationships and the citizens’ greater mobility across frontiers are to be held responsible, among other trends, for the ever-growing circulation of contracts or tax-related documents as well as for the proliferation of international banking transactions. As is also the case with other domains of professional activity, private, corporate and government dealings have effectively adopted English as a lingua franca in the last decades.

LE instruction in Higher Education settings is subject to some of the same constraints that apply, for example, in the Business English classroom:

• Legal English is widely regarded as a particularly opaque linguistic register which requires the students to be above average in their command of the language, particularly of their reading and writing skills. Tuck Onn (1997) has looked at this issue in the context of Malaysian universities and demonstrated how the recent decline in the Malay student’s standard of the language has affected their acquisition of Legal English to a greater extent than their performance in other specialised registers of the language. Following Onn’s reasoning, "because language plays a very important part in the making of laws, it follows that language is [more] essential in the learning of the law" (1997: 118) than in study of other disciplines.
• Texts and materials used in the LE classroom are often extracted from specialised manuals and reference books, which accounts for their highly academic, theoretical and decontextualised tone. These texts tend to be lexically and syntactically dense, such that the linguistic difficulties become even more intractable because of the content overload.
• Authors of Business, Technical or Legal English materials tend to target predominantly the students’ passive skills, mainly the reading comprehension ones. A significant proportion of the activities found in such materials only require the students’ regurgitation of facts from the texts, thus giving the student little opportunity to activate the items and structures of LE that they have previously learnt.
• Furthermore, it is often the case that students of LE are first exposed to certain technical concepts that they might not yet have come across in their Law course and, therefore, discussed in their mother tongue. Leaving aside the case of those language courses imparted to practising professionals enrolled in continuing education programmes, it is often the case that learners do not only learn language through law, but also law through language.

But unlike other strands of ESP, the practice of LE instruction is currently hampered by a number of factors which deserve immediate remedial action:

• First, few of the currently practising instructors of LE have themselves received some foundation training in law. As a matter of fact, it has been discussed elsewhere (Onn 1997) that many of such instructors regard their attachment to this area of specialism as fortuitous and, in many cases, temporary. Their use of legal material in the classroom being mainly accidental, the understanding and practice of legal notions, mechanisms and conventions at different levels of linguistic organisation are somehow neglected at the expense of other more conventional difficulties of the language.
• LE lacks a distinctive pedagogical tradition of its own. Interestingly enough, the prominence gained by the neighbouring discipline of Legal Translation in recent years has helped to draw our attention to this issue and argued the need for a more systematic approach to the interface between language and the law. Borja (1996) or Pérez-González (1999a) have dealt with the complexity of this relationship and advocated the necessity to define thorough curricula in terms of the fields of law, legal genres, text-types and features of legal language to be targeted in the classroom. Ideally, such syllabuses should allow the learners to progress in a cumulative fashion, while securing the integration between their insights into the language of the law and the laws of language.
• In fact, it is probably the contents of the relatively few published books on LE (among them Riley 1991, Russell & Locke 1992, Powell 1993, Fernández & Almendárez 1994) that best illustrate the extent to which the specific needs of LE students still remain neglected by the authors of teaching materials. Most of these volumes consist of topic-based compilations of texts usually taken from academic manuals and college law books and their content is one of legal concepts written for native speakers of the language. Even though they introduce new linguistic items to the students, in most cases they are not ESP material as such. Leaving lexical knowledge aside, these textbooks do not help to develop any distinctive skill that the student could not have as well improved using non-legal materials as a springboard. In fact, the learners are time and again asked to complete the reading comprehension questions set for them and trained in the use of elements such as relative pronouns or modals, without always being exposed to the different uses of these very same items in other fields of the language.
• Last but not least, it should be noted at this point that "the legal system is both defined and constrained by the language that expresses it" (Beyer & Conradsen 1995: 147). I have elsewhere (Pérez-González 1999a) explained that certain crimes, legal instruments and institutions are universal, while others are specific to an individual system —e.g. the common law in English-speaking countries or the civil law in continental Europe— insofar as their essence results from sophisticated linguistic formulations. It is precisely in this respect that LE deviates from other fields of ESP instruction. While certain lexical items will identify similar legal constructs in English, French or German, the acquisition of legal vocabulary is not always amenable to such a straightforward matching mechanism. As far as the acquisition of vocabulary is concerned, Spanish students of LE, for example, should be aware that it is not always enough to find English equivalent labels for the original terms, but of bridging the gap between asymmetric lexical systems.

While intercultural differences may be a relatively ancillary issue in Business English or unimportant in Technical English instruction, they are of central importance to LE and it is fairly obvious that the cultural specificity of the Law across languages is neglected by course books aiming at a universal readership. As a matter of fact, raising the students’ awareness of intercultural differences constitutes a pedagogical challenge whose success relies heavily upon the dynamics of the classroom, in terms of the teacher/students ratio, the learners’ standards of proficiency in English and the range of motivating tools available for classroom work.

In the rest of this article, I propose to illustrate the contributions of concordances to LE instruction, mainly by highlighting the specific uses of certain linguistic items/patterns in this area of specialism vis-à-vis their occurrences in non-legal contexts.

One of the most difficult areas in the acquisition of legal language is that of technical terminology and phraseology, that is, the relationship between a given term and its surrounding co-text. Despite the increasing availability of both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries as well as other types of reference materials in printed form (Alcaraz & Hughes 1994; Dictionary of Law 1993), acquiring vocabulary and phraseology in this area of specialism is still a difficult process for a number of reasons:

• Bilingual legal dictionaries are not always systematic in their handling of those units of meaning above the rank of the word.
• Bilingual legal dictionaries are not always systematic in their explanation of meaning. Their entries often include too much information, i.e. too many senses for only one word. In this connection, we should perhaps remind the reader that one of the most distinctive features of LE is the fact that it uses words which have both a technical and an everyday meaning, thus increasing the difficulty for the translator to choose the right equivalent in Spanish (Alcaraz 1993).
• Bilingual legal dictionaries do not always provide the learners with examples of the terms or phrases in actual use. This being so, students often fail to match specific senses/uses of the term with specific phraseological and/or grammatical patterns.
• Monolingual dictionaries, however, are not much more helpful, as linguistic problems add to content-related ones.
• All in all, learners of LE may not always succeed in finding matches for a search word/phrase. In other words, conventional reference tools do not encourage students to undertake further investigation of terms in co-text, i.e. phrases.

As opposed to traditional reference tools, the use of concordances in the classroom responds to a more induction-oriented teaching agenda, insofar as "such activities are meant to facilitate the learning process by providing data through which learners may form and test hypotheses and also by helping learners link the new with what they already know" (Nunan 1991: 149). Concordancing is a key tool in corpus research, the corpus being "a collection of naturally occurring language texts, chosen to characterise a state or variety of language" (Sinclair 1991: 14). The principle underlying the use of concordances is that of enabling the learner’s exposure to real language so that s/he can observe language in use; more specifically, concordances are aimed to furnish evidence on the actual use of whatever word/string of words is problematic for the language learner.

As the sample provided below illustrates, a concordance of any word/string of words lists every single occurrence of the former throughout the constitutive texts of the corpus. As explained by Sinclair (1991), concordances are typically exploited in the form of KWIC-formatted concordances. The default full Key-Word-In-Context format prints a whole line of text with the word under examination, i.e. the node, in the middle of the line and with extra space on either side of it. The surrounding text at both sides of the node constitutes its verbal environment and is commonly referred to as co-text. In other words, the node is offered to the researcher/learner for examination within its original context. The following sample concordance draws upon the MicroConcord corpus (1993): its social science minicorpus (corpus collection B) includes a selection of texts on law.

Different studies in the field of vocabulary acquisition (Nattinger 1988, Cowie 1988) have claimed that language use is a compositional process: in other words, language is stored and acquired in the form of prefabricated routines. More recently, other studies (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992, Lewis 1993, DeCarrico 1996) have reinforced these insights and argued that the recognition of prefabricated chunks of speech is an important aid to speeding the process of language acquisition, thus highlighting the importance of formulaic language ¾ i.e. idioms, lexical phrases, collocations, semi-idiomatic phrases and multi-word lexical phrases¾ and making it worthwhile to carry out further research on conventionalised units of language as the relevant units of analysis for studies on vocabulary acquisition.

Concordances allow students to integrate these theoretical intuition-based insights into their own learning experience, mainly by enhancing their awareness of the formulaic mechanisms which operate in everyday language use. Moreover, the use of concordances secures the learners’ active participation in the identification of multi-word patterns which revolve around one core element but have distinctive meanings in different contexts and draws their attention to the ways in which the foreign language is used to convey meaning. All in all, concordances help to implement a student-centred approach which empowers the learners to apply this empirical learning strategy on an autonomous basis.

Concordances can be exploited either in a selective or exhaustive fashion. Depending on the search node under investigation, the student might need to get rid of some concordance lines ¾ i.e. some non-relevant citations of the occurrences of the search node in the corpus¾ mainly through the formulation of restricted queries which place the search node in a specific phraseological context. Consequently, the potential number of citations is substantially reduced. Now one of the most distinctive features of concordances is that they are able to highlight certain linguistic patterns for the eye. In order words, the order of citations can be manipulated by the analyst with a view to optimise the search results. Accordingly, concordances can be alphabetically sorted out to the right of the keyword or to the left of the keyword. Such alphabetically sorting applies to those items which immediately precede or follow the search node, thus highlighting different visual patterns in each case.

The sample concordance in Appendix I below exposes the learners to a particularly recurrent grammatical pattern in this field of specialism. The overall activity, which consists of several stages, starts by getting the learners to play with the programme options, so that distinctive patterns around the initial search node(s) are highlighted on the computer screen. Students will then be asked to produce a stepped or edited concordance, where the lines displaying the same pattern will be placed together and sorted to the right or left of the node in order to gain an even deeper insight into pattern regularities. Having completed this stage, the learners will list the emerging patterns in the grid provided by the instructor and attempt to match them with the semantic sense (not necessarily legal when the search node is also used in general English) which, in their opinion, best suits the pattern as found in the concordance line. In testing their hypotheses, the students learn to regard the co-text as a reliable source of information, overcome the shortcomings of traditional reference tools and develop a more autonomous stance to the process of learning itself. The activity ends with a practical application of the pattern in question: the student is given a chart representing the hierarchy of the courts in England and Wales and asked, among other things, to refer to their jurisdictions as being either binding on or bound by those of other lower or higher courts, respectively.

In this paper, I have analysed those factors that turn LE into an idiosyncratic field within the overall domain of ESP instruction, arguing the case for a detailed analysis of the needs of LE students and the ensuing design of distinctive curricula which give primacy to the former. I have also discussed the ways in which concordances manage to meet some of those needs, as opposed to the traditional reference tools that fail to provide the learners with direct insights into the interface between language and the law. The direct access to corpus data or edited concordance output allows the learners to identify specific linguistic trends of LE, classify the latter and, finally, generalise on the basis of their learning experience.

• Bind/Binding/Bound as search words.
• Play with the priority options in order to highlight visually the relevant patterns of use.
• Sort out the entries according to their meaning.

• Now write down the patterns you have come across in the table below:

• Finally, fill each of the definitions below with one of more of these patterns:

• If something is bound up with a problem, a feelings, a belief, situation, etc., it is closely connected with this problem, feeling, belief, situation, etc.

• A binding issue, decision, force or an issue, decision or force which is binding on/upon is one which must be obeyed, carried out or implemented.

• If you bind yourself/somebody else to do something, you force yourself or somebody else to carry out that action.

• When we say that society is bound by the law, we mean that we all have the obligation to obey the law.

• If we say that something is bound to take place or happen, we are sure that it will happen.

• When somebody is bound for a particular place, s/he intends to travel there.