Abstract:

The paper examines aspects to be considered when teaching legal English to a wide variety of possible percipients as when choosing the scope of terminology to be taught, especially in the process of teaching a professional language, the teacher must realize who the target group of the educational process is and adapt the form and content of the teaching to that. Such specific ESP teaching process has its own methodology and Dudley-Evans & St. John (1998) emphasize the fact the any ESP training must reflect the methodology of the disciplines and professions it serves, the activities that students undertake are created and depend on the level of language that students must master in order to be able to carry out the activities and that the interaction between the student and the teacher may be different from that taking place in the general English lesson. The needs identified for a particular group of students are the result of a needs analysis project and their definition. Due to that, the author of the paper also focuses on the task of the teacher to perform so called pre-teaching activities, for instance needs analysis, to consider extent and classification of legal terminology, to identify target groups, etc.

As a result of that, the author investigates into all identified target groups and defines the method and content of teaching for each such group. In teaching legal terminology to differing target group, the author also proposes that the teacher should consider, e.g. to what extent the students are "only" to master so-called general legal terminology, i.e., the one that is the same for both legal systems from which and to which the translation takes place in the context of teaching and/or also so-called culture-bound legal terminology, which is typical for only one of those systems of law.

In addition to identification of target groups, i.e. the students, the author also focuses on the personality of a teacher. For instance, CLIL teachers can be divided into two types:
a) teachers of professional courses who teach their course in English / foreign language – with this, problems of limited language knowledge and limited knowledge of language teaching methodology may be related,
b) language teachers who teach professional terminology in English – here, problems of ignorance of the subject matter may be concerned, etc.

In this respect, Zelenková (2015, p. 38) states that in the case of foreign language studies at non-philological faculties one can speak of the dual focus of vocational language training, and she continues that the international and intercultural interconnection of professional and academic areas is currently the most important factor influencing the teaching of professional foreign languages.

Therefore, the author comes to the conclusion that the best CLIL teacher would be a person who is able to make a unity of both linguistic and professional approach, therefore with both the linguistic-didactic and legal background, at least in some selected target groups as suggested in the paper.

This is significant, as it is a pedagogical mastership to provide each target group with a correct and corresponding level of content so that the students were able to understand the subject matter of the teaching but would not be at the same time demotivated by its too high technical level in which the language itself would be lost.

Keywords:

Legal English teaching, target group, CLIL, university.