Modelling the content of teaching and learning English as a lingua franca for modern legal communication

• Lyudmila V. Yarotskaya

  Lyudmila V. Yarotskaya National Research Nuclear University Mephi. Moscow. Russia

• Svetlana Yu. Budennaya

  Svetlana Yu. Budennaya O.E. Kutafin Moscow State Law University, K.G. Razumovsky Moscow State University of Technologies and Management (the First Cossack University). Moscow. Russia

y the turn of the 21st century, using English throughout international legal space had resulted in its obviously acquiring a new status – that of a lingua franca for modern legal communication. However, it has not been duly addressed either by linguists or by the language pedagogy community so far. The aim of the article is to close the gap: through analysis of literature relevant to the problem in question, generalization and systematization of the data obtained, and interpretation of the results thus collected, to work out and substantiate an invariant
content model of teaching and learning English as a legal lingua franca. The outline of corre-ponding objectives shapes the content of the article and include: establishing the status of the English language as a legal lingua franca and providing its language pedagogy perspective
harmonized with the hierarchy of up-to-date communicative and action-oriented needs representative of the world legal community. With the discovered hierarchy reflecting the teaching-and-learning strategy and the substantiated content selection tools underlying lingua franca se-
lection procedures, the invariant model for teaching and learning the content is further specified through a system of descriptors and tested.
Keywords: legal lingua franca, English, teaching-and-learning content model, communicative and actionoriented needs, international lawyer.