Implementing Good Practice Pedagogy to Support Law Students’ Writing Skills

Abstract

The current focus on the standard of writing of both school and university students in Australia underscores the responsibility of law schools to support and develop their students’ writing skills. Good practice principles recommend that writing development at law schools should occur in an embedded context with subject matter content and led by law academics as experts in the discourse of law. Programs should also be informed by theory about how students learn literacy and developed in consultation with academic language and learning (‘ALL’) experts. However, there are few studies of embedded writing programs in law in Australia, and the impact of consultation with ALL experts is also not an issue which has been extensively explored. This article reports on the results of a mixed-methods study of an embedded writing program in law at a large regional Australian university. It demonstrates that it is possible to implement a writing program based on good practice pedagogy without making substantial changes to the existing curriculum. It also reveals the importance of focusing the support on the teaching academics, rather than on individual students, and ensuring that academics are supported by ALL expertise, to provide them with the tools to be able to talk to their students about language in their discipline. The quantitative aspects of this study also demonstrate that a writing program based on an understanding of how students develop academic literacy appears to lift the performance of students who may not have traditionally been admitted to law school.