Abstract
The article deals with the analysis of legal thrillers as an important didactic source of an efficient integration of American legal novels into two disciplines for law students. It considers the didactic potential of the novels “A Time to Kill”, “The Firm”, “The Street Lawyer” and “The Appeal” as examples of extensive reading projects within the course “Legal Families of the World” for third year students of law and an ESP course for second-year students of law at Perm State University. The methods applied in the research included cross-cultural observation, the intersection of literature and language teaching, curriculum design, survey and students’ feedback analysis. The research deals with extensive reading projects of both long graded thrillers, whole novels, and short passages from the original novels during one semester. Upon the completion of the reading projects the students reflected on their experiences by filling in a survey. The findings show a significant didactic potential of using legal thrillers. The participants can develop professional legal competence when discussing and interpreting the author’s novels while studying the US legal system. Some other outcomes reveal that integrating legal thrillers into EMI and ESP subjects is beneficial for all aspects of the educational process, including motivating environment. Such innovative technology contributes to students’ awareness of the professional subject, cross-cultural understanding, increasing their level of language proficiency and becoming autonomous readers.
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Polyakova, S., Gritsenko, E., Suslova, I., Yakovleva, E., Frolovich, E., Johansen, M. (2022). Legal Thriller: The Didactic Potential. In: Rocha, A., Isaeva, E. (eds) Science and Global Challenges of the 21st Century - Science and Technology. Perm Forum 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 342. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89477-1_59
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