Abstract:

Current standards of both international education and collaboration in different professional fields require graduates’ competences in regard to LSP(Language for Specific Purposes) mastery and IT (Information Technologies) literacy.
While the focus on LSP mastery is getting stronger, a variety of IT tools to design language courses for blended education is increasing.
Students are accustomed to using standard internet-based IT (wikis, blogs, MUDS, chats, e-mails, etc) in language learning with focus on cross cultural communication aspects.
However LSP didactics grounds on students’ professional needs. Thus LSP teachers have to integrate in respective courses assignments that envisage specialised IT usage. A draft list of such IT for training lawyers-to-be goes bellow, including the following tools:
• specialised IT that legal professionals in a concrete field use in their daily routine work (internet-based legal concordances)
• IT that can help students realise peculiarities of the context-dependant specialised discourse in a language they learn for professional purposes ( legal blogs, online legal dictionaries by the EU directorate of translation, on-line legal video, i.e. Court TV.com).
• IT that train students’ comparative and cognitive skills in regard to bilingual communication in a professional setting (language parallel concordances, semantic web map technologies)
• IT that train students’ skills in computer assisted translation that is often is a part of daily routine in international companies (Translation memory technology)
• IT that provide opportunities for self-assessment and control ( i.e. internet-based resources for blended LSP learning designed by Translegal, publishing materials in the group blog))
These IT are being a part of assignments in each LSP course unit. Students get such course done with individual e-portfolios that are widely required by employers taking graduates with no work experience.
Such e-portfolios reveal graduates’ mastery in regard to individual and team-based project work, case study, LSP command and IT competence for specific professional purposes.
This approach requires more efforts from LSP teachers to be put into an LSP course design as teachers have to closely cooperate with professionals in a concrete field on a permanent basis to select IT and renovate content-based materials that respond to students’ needs in regard to their degree and professional competence.
Specialized Internet –based Technologies have to take their place in LSP blended course as they encourage students’ motivation, enhance their abilities to collaborate within the professionally oriented community and provide for self-assessment opportunities.

Keywords:

web technologies, competence paradigm, lsp teaching, e-portfolio.