Corpus-based Legal English Teaching

Since1980s, with rapid development of computer processing technology, variousresearches based on corpus are increasing accordingly. It is well known that corpuslinguistics have been widely used into such subjects as dictionary compilation, secondlanguage acquisition, translation research, stylistics, foreign language teaching, andforensic linguistics, which has greatly expanded the vision of applied linguistics,especially in foreign language teaching. Many foreign and Chinese linguists andscholars have paid attention to this aspect and considered application of corpus toEnglish teaching as a main branch in corpus linguistics. However, legal English isdifferent from any natural language, as it is an “artificial language” with specificideology, so it is not suitable to apply traditional ways of teaching in legal Englishteaching. Applying corpus in legal English teaching can help the construction ofsmall-scale corpus for legal English teaching, deepen the understanding of students forlegal contexts, dig out the spirit of law contained in legal language, improve thetraditional way of teaching, make students truly master the essence of the common lawsystem, and satisfy the high-quality requirement for legal professionals.Therefore, this thesis inevitably becomes an explorative expedition to apply corpusin Legal English teaching. It introduces relevant information about legal Englishteaching and corpus, discusses theoretical bases and significance of applying corpus inlanguage teaching, and probe into the construction of a corpus for legal Englishteaching such as the design of corpus construction, collection and classification of datafor the corpus, annotation of language materials, the process of dealing with the dataand testing of application of the corpus in legal English teaching, hoping that theconstruction and the application of the corpus can enable the students to learn legalEnglish actively and master legal English easily.