“Your Honour, if I may…” Teaching politeness and other soft skills in videoconferencing classes
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presentation offers an insight into the structure and basic methodological principles used in delivering an international and cross-cultural course of English for students of law which is offered jointly to law students at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic and University of Helsinki, Finland. With the use of videoconferencing technology, the two groups of students meet in a virtual classroom in order to practice presenting, negotiating, debating, case studies and role-play. They also communicate outside the classroom via wiki in order to plan the sessions and practice their writing skills. The fact that the two groups of students are physically distant and communicate via the videoconferencing equipment makes the communicative situation slightly different from the traditional classroom. Apart from the obvious technical issues, there are certain psychological moments that can distract or even disable the intended communicative situation. These are mostly connected with the wrong choice of words in terms of expected semantics, level of formality, politeness and other pragmatic issues. Authentic examples of learning situations (i.e. short videos) will be played and discussed in order to demonstrate the universal importance to teach soft skills and to introduce language pragmatics, and especially politeness principles, to the B2-C1 CEFR level students, who are the future lawyers. Another aim of the presentation is to show that raising awareness of cultural differences is an issue that must be considered, pointed out to and discussed with the students, no matter how close their cultures may seem. Samples of teaching materials will be offered for inspiration and discussion. |
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