Recent innovations in academic support for LLMs at St. John’s

With each additional year I work at St. John’s Law School, my role seems to evolve increasingly from “legal English” teaching toward a larger umbrella category of “academic support for non-native English speaking LLM students,” with language support of course being a significant component.

This is because, while much of my direct teaching has been with “pre-LLM” students (i.e., our 4-week summer English for American Law School (EALS) course; our concurrent Spring EALS course; and our full semester ALDA legal English program), my colleagues and I have recognized that the majority of our LLM students still have continuing language and academic support needs and areas for improvement throughout their time in the program. This shift has grown in part out of conversations I’ve had with our legal English counterparts at Georgetown Law, who have been offering extensive legal English support to their LLMs for some years now. And it’s also benefited from interactions with our very collaborative Dean of Academic Achievement, Susan Landrum, whose focus is on JD students but frequently has tuned us in to helpful resources and best practices in the field of academic support in general as well as the existence of a large and collaborative community of law school academic support professionals.

Armed with increased awareness and knowledge, the challenge has been to somehow squeeze in substantive ongoing language support while also adapting other forms of academic support for non-native English speaking LLM students (and also for the increasing number of international JD students) without burdening or interfering with students’ already busy schedules and coursework. To that end, here are some of the solutions I and my Office of Graduate Studies colleagues have developed:

1. Conversation Partners Program: Native English speaking JD student volunteers are matched with LLM students who express interest in having a Conversation Partner. (This includes my ALDA students who are required to have a Conversation Partner.) A key “innovation” that I think has helped encourage participation is setting 15 minutes as the amount of time for Conversation Partners to meet (as opposed to an hour or 30 minutes). Also, building relationships with and soliciting JD student volunteers from student groups such as the International Law Student Association and the Multi-lingual Legal Alliance.

2. Written Language Feedback Project: Currently, two Writing Fellows from the law school’s Writing Center are now providing written language feedback to a sample group of 8 students from the LLM Legal Research & Writing course during the semester with guidance and oversight from me.

St John’s LLM Summer Pre-Bar Prep Program

This summer we are excited to roll out our first-ever Summer LLM Pre-Bar Prep Program. This is a self-study program for St. John’s LLM students who are planning to take the bar exam in 2019, and it focuses on helping those students continue to improve language fluency as well as general and specific knowledge over the summer months.

The self-study curriculum will consist of:

1. An extensive reading program to build vocabulary, reading speed and fluency, and background knowledge.

• Time is perhaps the biggest challenge for LLM students on the bar exam. It takes LLM students longer to read the questions and process the information. Additionally, vocabulary and background knowledge can be significant impediments to comprehension. e.g., A fact pattern that references American football. And the best way to “tackle” all three of these aspects is extensive reading, i.e., 1) reading a lot; 2) of texts that are easy to read (90% of vocabulary is familiar); and 3) and of texts that are enjoyable to read (because if it’s not enjoyable, then students don’t read a lot).
• For our extensive reading program, we rely in a large part on Newsela, which contains a very large and constantly growing library of actual news articles and other texts, all re-written at 4 additional (and easier) levels. In other words, if an article is too difficult, you can simply choose an easier version to read. Or viewed from another perspective, there are tons of very easy-to-read and genuinely interesting texts which is fantastic for building reading speed and vocabulary. Additionally, Newsela has a trove of articles on law and American legal history and culture–all written at 5 different levels–including the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Brown v. Board of Ed, and Plessy v. Ferguson. All of this content, including the non-legal content, is great for building the kind of cultural and background knowledge that American students learn growing up and that professors and test makers assume students possess.
• Additionally, each article (and each level of each article) has a 4-question quiz that can be used to check and see how well the student understood the article.
• Drawing on this resource, we put together a collection of law-relevant content that students can choose articles from each week.
• Using the tools provided via our Newsela account, we can easily track the students’ reading and quiz scores over the summer.