Bringing linguistic research to legal education

Language plays a central role in legal settings. The way linguistic diversity is conceptualized and accommodated can affect access to justice in a myriad ways and there is a plethora of linguistic scholarship to show that. Yet a growing concern among researchers working in this area is that this scholarship may not always reach the right audiences to have as much of a real-world impact as it could or should have.

In this post, I report back on the way in which I integrated my research expertise – in linguistics and beyond – into my teaching. I first provide some background on the teaching context, and explain what I did to integrate linguistics (and other) scholarship into my teaching during the changes that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, I will share the feedback I received about the learning materials I developed and critically reflect on possible next steps.