‘What’s a Concept?’

This question came up in class during my first semester as a graduate student, and it has remained with me ever since. In many ways, it was this question that led to the study described in this book. About a year after beginning to think about the role of concepts in language instruction, I started working as a language specialist with international graduate students in law. As I sat in on legal writing classes, I heard over and over again that the primary goal of such courses was to help students to ‘think like a lawyer.’ In my work with students, it became clear that discipline-specific conceptual frameworks played an important role not just in their subject matter knowledge, but also in their ability to make sense of language use in the genres that they were learning to read and write. Different ways of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ shaped learners’ approaches to looking at legal texts.

It seemed that these students were learning at least two different types of disciplinary concepts in their law courses. One category of concepts included the kinds of terms that are typically found in legal vocabulary lists and are recognizable as key terms even by those outside the field, such as mens rea or proximate cause. These kinds of terms, which can be described as discourse-relevant concepts, are typically associated with students’ knowledge of legal doctrine and appear overtly in legal texts. A second category of concepts, however, played a more subtle role in students’ learning. These included concepts that students were briefly introduced to at the beginning of their studies, such as the notion of precedent or reasoning by analogy, but which continued to come up implicitly in the structure of a wide range of classroom interactions, writing tasks and reading assignments. Although this second category of concepts shaped the discourse used throughout this instructional context, they were often not mentioned overtly. For a number of students, it was this second category, discourse-structuring concepts, that was more challenging.