Teaching the discourse of legal risk to finance professionals: foundations for a linguistically scaffolded curriculum

The paper reports on the collaborative development by a linguist and a lawyer of materials for postgraduate students grounded in one discipline (finance) and seeking to understand the structure and terminology of another (law), for some of whom English is an additional language. We introduce the notion of a Linguistically Scaffolded Curriculum in which exercises and tasks traditionally used for language learning are adapted for content learning and distinguish it from Content-Based Language Instruction and Content and Language Integrated Learning. We outline theoretical and practical motivations for a materials-based approach that simultaneously scaffolds an understanding of key concepts, reasoning, and discipline-specific language skills, and allows students to study at their own pace. We illustrate three types of exercises (gapped texts, unordered concept clusters, and scaffolded argumentation); and we describe the role of an enabling discourse that is neither sub-technical nor general but critical to understanding and expressing legal concepts.