SCAFFOLDING THE WRITING COMPONENT OF THE ENGLISH FOR LAW SYLLABUS AT UNIVERSITY

The present paper is intended to be a practical guide for teachers who need to run writing for law classes for pre-experienced law students with no or little experience of academic or legal writing. It provides the teachers with advice on how to teach students to draft modern documents by sequencing and selecting the content that reflects the needs of practising lawyers. It shows how legal writing stems from academic and general writing. Overlapping or common elements of academic and legal writing are identified and sequenced in order to create an introductory base for writing for legal purposes.

Types of texts that lawyers draft have been selected and used as the scaffold- ing for writing tasks specially designed to suit the students’ proficiency and expertise.