Using Apples to Apples (the game) in legal English teaching

I wish I had thought of this sooner, but this semester I finally started using Apples to Apples (the game) in my Legal Writing & Analysis class for the LLM students in St. John’s Advanced Certificate for Legal English program.

Why am I doing this? And how did this happen? It was sort of by accident. And perhaps sort of not. But either way, very glad I arrived at this place with my students.

First, about the game: I realized a year or so ago that it’s an ideal game for legal English. Because in it, one person is a judge and everyone else is essentially a lawyer trying to analogize and persuade. In the game, in each round one person is a judge. And the judge picks a green card which has an adjective on it. And everyone else has a hand of red cards, which are all nouns and noun phrases of various sorts (e.g., Woody Allen; My Love Life; Mice; Ginseng; Roman Numerals; Body Piercing; Tornadoes; Oprah Winfrey; etc.) From their hand, they pick a card that they think is the best match for the adjective on the green card. They submit their card face down so the judge doesn’t know who submitted which card (to ensure impartiality.)

Next, the judge turns over each card and then renders a decision. But the fun (and culturally and linguistically interesting) part is that as the judge turns over each card, she comments on it and shares some of her reasoning out loud in order to justify her eventual decision. And while she is doing this, other players interject their own comments and reasoning in an effort to sway the judge one way or another. At the same time, they try to do it in a way that doesn’t blow their cover (or sometimes does.) (If it’s still not clear, here’s a short youtube video that explains and demonstrates the game.)

I first taught the game to students a few years ago, as an end of the semester activity. They really enjoyed it. And from a language learning perspective, games are a great way to lower students’ affective filter (i.e., make them relax) and also provide excellent motivation as well as opportunities to practice oral communication in a low stakes environment.

Fast forward to August 2019, the week before classes. I was running an optional intro class for my Advanced Legal English Certificate students and decided to introduce them to a series of games to get them using more English and also to get them to bond and feel more comfortable together as well as learn a little something related to American culture.

Complicating the situation was the fact that I had promised my 9-year-old daughter that she could come to work with me that day. An additional complication popped up that morning as my colleague informed me that she was bringing her 9-year-old and 6-year-old daughters to work that day because they wanted to see my daughter. (Thus, history recorded what may have been the first Bring Your Children to Legal English Work Day. Though if you know of others, please don’t hesitate to let me know!)

Legal writing: Teaching analogy and comparison language to LLM students

I recently finished reading an excellent and exciting article titled Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices in U.S. Legal Writing, by Elizabeth Baldwin, a professor of legal writing who has an MA in Applied Linguistics and works with LLM students at the University of Washington School of Law. I say exciting because each page that I read seemed to open my eyes and my mind and spark new ideas about teaching legal writing to LLM students.

In the article, Elizabeth–one of the founders of the ETLEP legal English Google Group together with Alissa Hartig, Lindsey Kurtz and me following the 2015 Global Legal Skills Conference in Chicago–distinguishes between coherence (top down: does it make sense?) and cohesion (bottom up: does it feel connected and logical?) A text can be coherent, i.e., you understand what the writer is saying, yet lack cohesion, i.e., the ideas feel disjointed and unnatural in some way you can’t quite put your finger on.

The article explains how cohesion can be lexical (e.g., use of repetition and synonyms) as well as grammatical (e.g., use of conjunctive words and phrases to connect information between sentences; use of a subordinated clause to front information so that it feels connected to information in the previous sentence).

However, the article really grabbed my attention at one point when it described a particular cohesive device that involves use of the pattern: [determiner + abstract noun]. (Determiners include a, an, the, this, these, my, your, which, other, and a bunch of other words you know but just didn’t realize were determiners.) An example might be a sentence along the lines of: