The Law-specific Words That Make up a Quarter of LLM Reading Dr Jenny Kemp, Leicester University
The reading requirements for an LLM are demanding for any student, but particularly if their first language is not English, or if they come from a non-Law background. This is partly because these students are not primed to recognise the law-specific meaning and usage of words. Yet the ability to recognise and process words quickly is central to successful reading comprehension. So which words do they most need? To answer this question, I compiled a two-million-word corpus covering 12 domains of private and public international law. The ‘DSVC-IL’ corpus contains extracts from almost 900 documents from LLM reading lists, across 21 primary and secondary genres. The research identified a list of 1026 law-specific words that comprise, on average, a quarter of the word count of texts on international law reading lists. These words are particularly common in law texts, and many have a discipline-specific meaning and/or usage. For instance, a significant proportion serve an inter- and/or intra-textual function. In this session, I will outline the project and discuss the main findings. Then participants will discuss specific linguistic examples and possible activities. Whose responsibility is it to raise students’ awareness of this vocabulary? In what different ways could this be achieved?
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