MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE INFORMATION PROCESSING IN ENGLISH CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION FOR LEGAL PURPOSES

Book excerpt: English for Law (also called Legal English Teaching) is a big challenge for EFL/ESL teachers worldwide. Multimodal teaching and learning may engage law students with legal content and the English language by using multiple communication modes and mediums. But what are the multi-modes and multi-mediums specific to the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) course? How would teachers deal with that complicated multimodal information? How would teachers intrigue students' interest, focus their attention, and guide them to follow, respond, analyze, extend, and comment? And how would teachers build students' critical thinking skills and shape international elites' dispositions? This book would discuss more in-depth the above questions. The new analysis framework of MDIP (Multimodal Discourse Information Processing) could decode classroom participants' interactive intentions from their multimodal presentation discourses, could focus LCTA (Legal Critical Thinking Abilities) as the primary training purpose of Legal English Teaching, and could provide Legal English Teaching with discursive, cognitive, and communicative information strategies. With the help of MDIP strategies, teachers are clearer at how to extract the legal documents' genres, how to create the lecture schemata, how to generate visualized tree discourses, how to build hierarchies among multimodal information, how to allocate teaching, learning, and assessing tasks in classroom instruction, etc. As a result, Legal English Teaching's course design will become much less challenging for EFL/ESL teachers.