Identifying students likely to benefit from language support in first‐year Law

Abstract

As writing skills have a significant impact on a Law student’s ability to successfully complete assessment tasks, it is important to identify early, and refer to appropriate programs, students likely to benefit from language and writing skills support. This article describes in‐class exercises developed in the Law School at the University of Melbourne to identify students with writing ‘difficulties’. Analysis of students’ first semester results confirmed that the exercises were effective in identifying a group of students who may underachieve. Importantly, in both 2005 and 2006 almost half the first‐year Law students referred to support through the exercises were domestic students. Thus, we caution that English language testing of international students is not sufficient to identify all students likely to need or benefit from support programs. We recommend measures such as the exercises described in this paper as a quick and effective means of screening the entire commencing cohort.

Keywords:

• international students
• language testing
• legal education
• writing skills

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr Pip Nicholson and Dr Jackie Peel, coordinators of HPL 1 and PPL, for permission to describe and discuss in this paper the class exercises used in their subjects. We also acknowledge Dr Lee Godden’s helpful advice on the general use of in‐class exercises.

Notes

1. Hawthorne et al. (2004) note that in 2003, 35% of the ‘local’ medical students at the University of Melbourne were born overseas; with the primary source countries being Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam (p. 151 and note 1, p. 152).

2. In a similar vein, Douglas (2001) has identified that ‘specific purpose language performance assessment criteria devised by second language testing/teaching professionals may be different from those of most concern to non‐testing/teaching professionals’ (p. 172). He advocates, moreover, that specific‐purpose language testing criteria can be aligned more closely with the areas of concern to practitioners in the field or context by deriving them from the target language use situation.

3. As was noted by one of the anonymous reviewers, a comparison of the kinds of processes employed in other Law Schools would be interesting further work.