Publication details
Savoir disciplinaire au service de la pensée critique en cours de francais juridique : lecons de la psychologie cognitive
| Title in English | Disciplinary knowledge at the service of critical thinking in a course in legal French: lessons from cognitive psychology |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Language Learning in Higher Education; Journal of the European Confederation of Language Centres in Higher Education (CercleS) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cercles.2017.7.issue-2/cercles-2017-0013/cercles-2017-0013.xml |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2017-0013 |
| Field | Pedagogy and education |
| Keywords | critical thinking; disciplinary knowledge; cognitive psychology; legal French; authenticity; French judicial jurisprudence |
| Description | The aim of this article is to demonstrate and defend the importance of disciplinary knowledge for the development of students' critical thinking in the context of a B2 level course in legal French. In this study, I rely, though not exclusively, on the findings of cognitive psychology. In order to demonstrate the relevance of my approach, I present a set of activities corresponding to these aims carried out within the framework of a legal French course offered by the Masaryk University Language Centre (Brno, Czech Republic). The activities are based on navigation in an online database of French legal texts. Their objectives vary. Students seek laws and court decisions according to given criteria, analyse them, reconstruct procedures and present facts on a timeline. Differences in form and substance between the two national systems are also compared and discussed. The paper also explicitly considers processes that develop and strengthen critical thinking, namely dealing with concepts and creation of a problem schema, while giving consideration to the language objectives of a LSP course. |