Beyond the crime scene: designing a criminalistics module in a Legal Spanish course

One of the major challenges for any L2 teacher is to integrate vocabulary components into a course. Determining what words to select in order to satisfy the goals of the course and what instructional methodology best suits the purpose of vocabulary learning are not easy tasks. Even more difficult is dealing with the formulaic terminology of a domain-specific vocabulary that students have not previously encountered. In this paper, I describe a criminalistics module within a Legal Spanish course that has a mock trial as a final assignment. In order to learn the terminology for the final assignment, incidental vocabulary learning through reading, watching a movie, and listening to a talk was seen as complementary, but not sufficient. Instead, intentional vocabulary learning has proven more effective because it reinforces retention of novel vocabulary and leads to its eventual production in the final task.