Self study & materials

ISBN 0-9537653-2 6 £8.95 - postage charged at cost with an additional charge of £1.00 per order to cover packaging materials etc.

Read Rory Braddell's review

There is a big gap in the market for books that cater for special interest fields of English language training (ESP). Have you ever had trouble finding materials for training legal English? I would expect that to be the case. And until recently, I have had no success in finding a book that could unravel the mystery of legal terminology. Even as a native English speaker, I find words like “covenant,” “indemnify” and “force majeure” quite difficult to assimilate into my active vocabulary. That is until I picked up a copy of An Essential A-Z of Business Law by Catharine Mason and Rosemary Atkins, which certainly has gone a long way to rectifying this problem.

As an advocate of lexical training materials, I think that a vocabulary resource book should focus on the teaching of collocating words in their situational environment. It is just as important, therefore, when learning new words to find ways of recording lexical information concerning the manner in which words are used and combined. To this end, a cloze procedure can be quite useful, as students are required to think about words in their context and identify strong word combinations. The authors of An Essential A-Z of Business Law have found a good balance between a reference work with an A-Z, glossary feel to it, and a conventional vocabulary trainer using a lexical approach. The book is useful because it, not only deals with individual items of vocabulary and their meanings, but also gives students an opportunity to see each word in use. The “vocabulary” pages are headed by a letter of the alphabet, and the terms are listed alphabetically throughout the book. In each of these alphabetical sections, 14 terms are defined as they would be in a typical advance learner’s dictionary, and on the following, “practice sentence” pages, examples are given of the words in context. These examples are presented in the style of a typical cloze test, requiring creative exploration on the part of the student. It is essentially a three step process: the word itself, a definition, and gap-fill example. The word “Liability” is defined as the “legal responsibility for something” and in the cloze exercise, “My client is not _______ for any breach of the terms of the contract as he was not party to it.” The idea of giving simple definitions and examples is well established in most advanced learner’s dictionaries, and is effective in facilitating the acquisition of vocabulary. In this respect, I think that the book is based on very solid lexical principles, providing us with an opportunity to learn new legal terminology and also reactivate existing knowledge.

Does reading a definition and doing a cloze exercise mean the student has learned the term? Unfortunately not, because, as research tells us, most newly acquired items of vocabulary fall victim to the forgetting curve and new words need to be repeated a minimum of 5 or six times before they are fully learned. For example, if a student acquires 15 new terms, then the majority of these new words will be forgotten within the first 24 hours. One can conclude that the initial learning process does not mean the students have actually learned the terms. Subsequent repetition, testing and active use are needed if they are going to actually retain the word in long term memory. AnEssential A-Z of Business Law addresses this problem by including crossword units that facilitate revision and consolidation of vocabulary. The format of the book presents a challenge because it is alphabetical and there are less possibilities for inbuilt revision, so it is up to the student to structure learning through self-imposed repetition. Had the book been structured around topic areas, I think that the words would be easier to learn. For example, a chapter on litigation, property law and so on. I think that this is a better approach because it means that words are not abstracted from their textual and ve rbal origins, and complete articles or documents can be used as a rich source of functionally related terms. However, the 294 terms included in this book have been carefully selected for their relevance, making it possible for the student to understand a wide range of legal documents and articles. AnEssential A-Z of Business Law is an extremely useful book for those of us with gaps in our understanding of law, and I would recommend it to language learners working or studying the field of business law.

Rory Braddell - January 2007

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