Abstract:

Teaching legal English through virtual platforms (like Zoom) has become inalienable component and effective means of substitution of face-to-face studies during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. These platforms provide an opportunity of on-line video demonstration to the participants of the class session. The possibility to use authentic videos is vital in teaching foreign languages as it allows to gain, comprehend and acquire information about the picture of the world of the foreign country. The aim of the research is to describe the strategies, formulate the objectives and describe the appropriateness of YouTube video demonstration at the legal English classes.

YouTube channel contains an uncountable number of topical videos, from 1 minute brief presentations to 1 hour and longer detailed opinions and lectures. The videos presented by the native speakers allow the students to penetrate into the picture of the world of another nation and increase the quality of communicative skills. The students can do it by means of different strategies of acquisition of lexical units. The effective strategies are considered to be word pick-upping and guessing. The main difference between the strategies is that the former contributes to vocabulary increase, while the latter helps to adopt the information in general, without going into detail, for example in listening comprehension.

Choosing the video, the professor may pursue different objectives, such as to illustrate a picture of the world of foreign culture, to specify valency (to motivate the choice of the synonym in the word-combination), and to differentiate the application of words having similar translation. Thus, it is possible to speak about:
1) generalization of lexemes,
2) specification of lexemes, and
3) differentiation of lexemes.

YouTube facilitates to update the fragment of the picture of the world under study in natural environment. It makes possible for the students to get an insight into verbal and non-verbal communicative links and associations in real modern situation.

Keywords:

YouTube, video, picture of the world, acquisition, authentic.