General English for Students of Law is a two-level reading series for upper intermediate and advanced-level English learners. The series is designed to enhance reading skills and develop students’ legal words.

    The book consists of fifteen units and each unit contains a reading accomplished by a variety of pre and post-reading activities. Vocabulary instruction is an important focus of this book and selected words from each reading are defined and practiced. The units can be taught out of sequence. However, by teaching the units in sequence, students will benefit fully from the same words introduced in previous units.

Structure of General English for Students of Law

Topic Review

The opening page of each unit includes a picture and two tasks. Part A is usually a problem-solving task in which students are asked to find synonyms, match definitions and words, guess meaning, or bring their personal opinions. Part B consists of some discussion questions providing a motivation for the text.

 Reading

     This section contains the reading related to legal material. Almost all new words from the reading are glossed after reading check. Reading check is designed to check students’ comprehension of the text. Part A is a set of true/false information. Part B includes multiple choice questions. Checking their understanding of main ideas, word meaning, inference, etc. 

Vocabulary check

    In this part, students revisit the same vocabulary that they studied before (in word definition part) using them to fill in the blank.

Cloze practice

     In order to build an awareness of syntactic and semantic cues in language, a paragraph with missing words is given. The words are listed in a box. Students use them to fill in the blank. These paragraphs are related to legal matters or subject of the reading.

Word Formation

   Through word form, and prefix/suffix activities, each lesson encourages students to expand on the vocabulary they have learned.

Close Reading

   This part can be used as a follow-up for students to expand their reading skills. Students must learn to grasp the general ideas of the readings. The transition from specific words to general ideas takes time, and the students need a great deal of encouragement to make this adjustment, they should try to guess the probable meaning of unfamiliar words from their context. The text has been designed for self-instruction as well as class instruction. When the text is used for class, the teacher can prepare many types of comprehension questions such as; true/false, multiple choice, matching or sentence completion questions.

    Important and/or difficult words and phrases are singled out for analysis of meaning, which will lead to better understanding of the reading.

Know a Court/ an Offence

This section is not for class-instruction and can be used in your leisure time to acquaint you with new words and expressions related to law.

 Grammar

  A selection of grammar exercises at the end of each lesson reinforces structural points. These grammatical points are introduced according to students’ usage and graded difficulty.