Dr Lijing Shi PEL.6.01H

Ms Hongyi Xin, PEL.6.01G

Students must have completed Mandarin: Level 5 (Standard) (LN719).

Student should have successfully completed LSE Level 5 or have reached high proficiency level of Chinese. They are expected to be able to communicate on rather complicated non-routine topics and recognise around 3000 characters.

COURSE AIM:

The linguistic focus will continue to advance the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, meanwhile helping the students to gain substantial knowledge into vocabulary, syntactic structures and pragmatic usages widely used in legal discourse. It features the general introduction into China’s legal system and its legal professions, with particular emphasis on Chinese civil and commercial laws. Authentic legal documents will be introduced extensively.

The course will enhance the students’ Chinese skills in legal contexts so as to prepare them for successful participation in their future professional communication.

COMMUNICATIVE CONTENT: The course is focused on the following communicative functions:

• Participating in discussion
• Logical argument
• Interaction/Exchange specific information in legal context
• Communication in legal context
• Reading and summarizing complex legal texts
• Writing letters, report and documents with legal elements
• Using language strategies to cope with specialized topics: i.e. law, business, politics and current issues.

STRUCTURAL CONTENT: This course will focus on the following grammatical areas:

• Mandarin pronunciation: Pinyin and tones
• Simplified characters
• Chinese advanced grammar review
• Specific grammatical aspects of topical texts 
• Relevant grammatical issues for advanced and specialized communication
• Attributives
• Adverbials
• Appositives
• Regular group or individual translation of legal works
• Reading and summarizing complex legal texts
• Advanced language tasks with reference to case studies
• Advanced language tasks with reference to Contemporary Chinese laws
• Reading comprehension
• Oral presentation

The course will introduce 350 words used in legal discourse.

It will bring students to level C2 of CEFR.

8 hours of workshops in the MT. 11 hours of workshops in the LT. 1 hour of workshops in the ST.

Students will be expected to produce 6 pieces of coursework in the MT and LT.

William C Jones "Basic Principles of Civil Law In China" published by ME Sharpe. Inc.

Websites:

www.civillaw.com.cn 

http://www.88148.com

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/dictionary.php?word=%E5%9A%B7&cache=21961

Dictionary on yellow bridge

Continuous assessment (70%) in the MT, LT and ST.
Oral examination (30%) in the LT.