Fostering multimodal literacy in ESP teaching: the case of lawyer-client interviews

This paper proposes a proof-of-concept teaching methodology for developing learners’ communicative skills in the context of lawyer-client interactions. The aim is to start working towards multimodal literacy in this specific ESP domain through a practice-oriented approach that draws learners’ attention to the verbal as well as the nonverbal features of this type of professional encounter. The existing mainstream materials give prominence to the verbal dimension of lawyer-client exchanges, to the detriment of other forms of meaning-making. The methodology proposed here builds on the concept of ‘Knowledge Processes’ identified by Kalantzis and Cope (2010), and consists of five main steps: (1) the observation and discussion of proxemic, kinesic, gaze and facial behaviours of two characters in a video clip from an episode of the American legal drama The Good Fight, in which a lawyer-client exchange is represented; (2) the reconstruction and acting out of the lawyer-client dialogue while/after watching the muted video clip; (3) the transcription of the actual lawyer-client dialogue while/after watching the video clip with audio; (4) the analysis of the verbal features of the observed lawyer-client interaction and of the interplay between verbal and nonverbal codes; (5) a final round of role-plays. The question of professional etiquette is also discussed, in order to identify some standards of behaviour expected of lawyers in English-speaking countries.