INTEGRATION OF LEGAL ENGLISH WITHIN AREA STUDIES FOR LAW STUDENTS IN CHINA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55197/qjssh.v6i6.939Keywords:
legal English, intercultural competence, area studies, CLIL, Chinese legal studentsAbstract
Legal English in China is rapidly evolving from technical language training into an intercultural, area-based pedagogy that prepares law students to navigate cross-border legal systems, cultural meanings, and pragmatic differences in global legal communication. This systematic review explores the reasons why Legal English (ELP programs) could be integrated within Area Studies for Chinese law students. Guided by Byram’s Model of Intercultural Competence (ICC) and Deardoff’s Process Model, this study thematically analyses 20 scholarly articles to identify emergent themes on the need to teach Legal English, pedagogical models and methods, and their outcomes, assessments, and gaps in this domain. The major findings reveal several dimensions of ELP-based pedagogy, viz., mapping the intercultural competence to communication skills and the interpretive capacity of learners in non-native environments. Hence, the application of Legal English in the Area Studies enabled an increase in overall employability, advocating for task-based frameworks and CLIL programs that showed overlapping objectives within different cultures and disciplines. However, ICC remains mostly self-reported and lacks performance-based scales. In the future, researchers should use longitudinal designs, broader and more diverse disciplinary samples, and triangulated assessment methods that combine performance-based tasks, client interviews, and validated self-report scales to increase the reliability of the study.
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Copyright (c) 2025 YUEYUAN LI, MARLIA PUTEH, PENGKANG LIU, FAN YANG
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