Using Memrise in Legal English Teaching

Abstract

Abstract.Memrise is an educational tool available both online and for mobile devices. Memrise uses flashcards and mnemonic techniques to aid in teaching foreign languages and memorizing information from other subjects, e.g. geography, law or mathematics. Memrise courses are created by its users through the process of crowdsourcing; therefore they are tailored to the individual needs of the users and may focus on the specific content of a particular coursebook or classes.The paper will attempt to present possibilities of using memrise in teaching and learning legal English vocabulary during a tertiary course leading to TOLES (Test of Legal English Skills) certificate examination. The paper will look at various types of exercises which facilitate memorizing vocabulary, learning collocations, prepositional phrases, develop the skill of paraphrasing and defining legal terms of art in plain English. Application of the crowdsourcing method enables the learners to participate in the process of the course creation and constitutes for them a supplementary, out of class exposure to the target language.The second part of the paper will discuss the results of the research conducted by the author among her law students. The aim of the research was to investigate the students' opinions about memrise as a tool which might facilitate individual learning of the specialist language, as well as to assess whether memrise may influence the test results achieved by the students during the legal English course. The paper will contrastively analyse the progress tests results achieved by the students who have used memrise to revise and recycle language material and those who have chosen traditional (non-mobile) methods of learning. The research also attempted to address the question whether the students who had been the contributors to the content of memrise courses had performed better in tests than those who had only been the users.

Sustaining Education with Mobile Learning for English for Specific Purposes (ESP): A Systematic Review (2012–2021)

“…Memrise [65] 3D Anatomical App [56] Mobile English Learn English on the go [43] Google Translate [55] Mobile dictionary SPEARA [62] Books vs. Brains@PolyU [60] Reading app Reading Practice App [64] Read with QR codes [67] Digital textbooks [47]…”

“…Vocabulary is one of the skills focused on in mobile learning. Studies conducted to identify learners' perception towards using mobile learning in improving their vocabulary acquisition reported positive perceptions [43,56,62,65]. Other studies said mobile learning helped learners acquire more vocabulary, and showed that specific discipline apps expanded their vocabulary [55,60].…”

Untitled

“…The spaced repetition technique based on the theory that a proper time interval of information representation allows maximizing the rate of learning [29]. AI technology in spaced repetition software applications allows recording and tracking progress, when the information was presented, how effective it was for a particular learner, and then to adapt the time intervals of the information representation when it is most appropriate for the learner.…”

Using Alexa for Flashcard-Based Learning

“…This issue could be solved in two ways: either making raw speech data available for developers to use external voice recognition tools such as Google's Cloud Speech-to-Text (SST) API 8 (which would also enable additional features such as using confidence scores for pronunciation training), or by integrating multilingual ASR within the Alexa development environment. Including multilingual functionality in this way would also allow users to create their own flashcards to learn and practice, which has been shown to be a positive feature of flashcard software that increases student performance [6,20].…”