Innovation in Language Learning

Socio-cultural aspects are often underestimated in the course of teaching ESP reading at universities. Moreover, they frequently constitute latent challenges as opposed to lexical, grammar and structural ones. That is the reason they are commonly unspotted by students and invariably cause mistakes. The purpose of the study is to identify socio-cultural difficulties inherent in Legal English texts as well as to classify them according to the previously determined criteria. The methods employed are as follows: surveying students and teachers, classification, comparative analysis, method of continuous sampling. The data were subject to the unified system of interpretation.

The students surveyed were selected according to the age, year of studying (2-year / 3-year students), academic achievements, level of proficiency in the foreign language at issue, and the time of training.

While singling out the texts were ranked in accordance with the level of difficulty taking into account that of the vocabulary, the sentence structure, quantitative characteristics of conceptual intensity, the degree of interest shown while perceiving the texts, conceptual complexity, informativeness, subjects (in accordance with the professional themes based on the analysis of the ESP syllabi), the degree of idiomaticity and expressiveness, problematic character, the perspective to transform the text.

The author analyzes and validates the data obtained through questioning teachers and students. Based on the evidence collected four groups of difficulties are identified and described. They fall within those that refer to using sources of reference, analyzing and increasing professional knowledge, systemizing and grouping socio-cultural vocabulary, and, finally, those related to contrasting professional realia in the target and original languages.