In teaching and researching English for Law, considerable effort has been put into the fine-grained description of legal genres and accounts of associated legal literacy practices. Much of this work has been carried out in the academic context, focusing especially on genres encountered by undergraduate law students. The range of genres which must…

Going to law school to get a law degree has become a little like going to an ice-cream parlor for a scoop of vanilla. Plenty of people still do it, but many schools' brochures--like the elaborate flavor-and-topping menus on ice-cream parlor walls--now tempt them with something different, something more. Law students can have their "juris…

Research studies have reported elevated rates of psychological distress (e.g., depression) in practicing lawyers yet little research has examined predictors of such problems in law students. Specific personality traits have been shown to be predictors of a range of psychological problems. We administered a battery of tests to a cohort of 1st-year…

The necessity of examination of every case within its peculiar conditions in social sciences requires different approaches complying with the spirit and nature of social sciences. Multiple realities require different and various perceptual interpretations. In modern world and social sciences, interpretation of perception of valued and multi-valued…

There is wide agreement that problem-based learning is a key strategy to promote individual abilities for "learning how to learn". This paper presents the main contributions that reflective journals and the problem-based learning approach can make to foster professional knowledge and quality learning in higher education. Thirty-six…

Legislative change, ethical dilemmas, and client management issues were all faced by social work students in a recent effort to impact guardianship in the State of Texas. Since the mid-1990s, Texas had been without a statewide system to provide guardianship services. In 2004 a group of social work students, law students, faculty, guardianship…

The University of San Francisco School of Law is one of at least a dozen law schools in the United States where students represent small investors facing big headaches, often because their brokers were more interested in maximizing their own commissions than in giving sound advice. Supervised by law professors, teams of students file motions,…

This article examines the sociocognitive context of two international students in academic programs in the United States. Bandura (2001) defines sociocognition as the interaction between an individual and the sociocultural elements that comprise his or her learning environment. Research in English for academic purposes has included more focus on…

Recent law school graduates face the tightest job market in years. Amid lingering industrywide uncertainties, officials at some law schools are scrambling to ensure that underrepresented minorities get jobs, especially law schools not customarily tapped by the country's largest law firms. In some of the more striking measures, a dean will troop…

This article focuses on the formation of conceptions of professional responsibility. Perspectives developed by the moral philosopher Larry May, supported by the social theory of learning, constitute the main analytical tools for the interpretation of law and psychology students' conceptions of professional responsibility by the end of higher…

This paper goes beyond the existing literature and explores the innovative topic of designing criterion-referenced assessment for online discussion forums. There are several benefits of embedding online discussion forums into subjects including engaging students in collaborative learning, and encouraging deeper analysis, critical thinking and…

Web-based distance education is an innovative modality of instruction in Colombia. It is characterized by the separation of the teacher and learners, the use of technological tools and the students' autonomy development. This paper reports the findings of a case study that explores students' perceptions about an English reading comprehension…

The forbidden-laptop zone is territory into which few professors dare tread. Students have been known to protest when laptops are banned from a classroom, and even claim that they are being denied a proper education. Professors who have taken the bold step, though, sound like they've experienced an epiphany. A professor at the University, Don…

This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of informal peer groups (colloquia) in a Law programme at a major Norwegian university. The research question focused on how students perceived and experienced participation in peer colloquia, and the learning potential of such groupings is discussed in light of the formal study…

Due to the complexity of the legal domain, reasoning about law cases is a very complex skill. For novices in law school, legal reasoning is even more complex because they have not yet acquired the conceptual knowledge needed for distilling the relevant information from cases, determining applicable rules, and searching for rules and exceptions in…