Practicing the Skill of Mediation in English for Legal Purposes

This article deals with mediation in language teaching, focusing on how the practice of mediation – as a specific language skill – can be incorporated in the syllabus. The chapter defines the skill of mediation as an emerging concept in language education, and discusses its potential for effective teaching of English for Specific Purposes in general and English for Legal Purposes in particular. The first part of the text seeks to answer several questions, aiming to determine whether mediation is relevant in the context of legal practice and whether it has a place in an English for Law syllabus. The second part addresses a more practical concern of how the skill of mediation can be practiced by students. The article makes a case for assigning mediation a much more central place in the classroom, giving a number of specific examples of how this soft skill can be developed in the teaching of ESP and ELP.