INTEGRATING NATION’S FOUR STRANDS IN TEACHING LEGAL ENGLISH VOCABULARY TO AROUSE LEARNERS’ INTEREST - AN EMPIRICAL STUDY AT HANOI LAW UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Contemporary researches on vocabulary acquisition have equipped teachers with countless diverse approaches to motivate their learners to enrich and retain their in-class taught terms. Nonetheless, employing these designed methods into teaching practices has not drawn up many teachers’ attention. In order to facilitate the teachers’ vocabulary teaching, Nation (2007a) introduced a method called The Four Strands. The paper aims to examine whether integrating the Four Stands into Legal English classes will waken students’ enjoyment of Legal English vocabulary learning or not. Therewith, it reveals students’ memorizing capability in legal English terms after a 7-week period. Two batches of juniors at Hanoi Law University in Vietnam were involved in the experimentation: One labelled the treatment group (N=30) and the other marked the control one (N=30). Survey questionnaires were used to figure out students’ awareness of necessity of legal English vocabulary learning and obstacles they faced as well. Besides, pre-test and post-test, and semi-structured interview were also imposed to collect data. The two first instruments illustrated that the experimental group outperformed the control group. Meanwhile, the third one was to measure students’ interest in the treatment group in legal English classes where the Four Strands principle used. The outcomes demonstrated that population in the treatment group showed more delectation in picking up legal English terms and their ability of retaining the words is more excellent than those in the control one, which was witnessed by scores of the two post-tests.