Legal English Coursebook Evaluation: An Evaluation Of Ten Legal English Coursebooks From The Perspective Of Needs Analysis

Along with the deepening of opening-up policy, especially after China's entering WTO, the need for international legal talents increases quite rapidly. In order to meet that urgent social need, it is necessary for college education to cultivate such law-English compound talents. Nearly all law schools, even some foreign language schools, have opened legal English course or even set up legal English majors. As legal English becomes a hot topic for college English education, a large number of coursebooks and reference books come out for the market. Different colleges, even the same college, use different legal English coursebooks. Due to the unequal quality of these coursebooks without a uniform syllabus, evaluation seems quite necessary and important, which may offer some implications or suggestions for the developing of standard coursebook in the future.Coursebook is a major material for language learning and coursebook evaluation has gradually attracted more attention from the theoretical and practical field. What kind of coursebook can achieve the best teaching and learning effect? The answer is worthy of study and investigation. Many scholars both from home and abroad have done great work on it. In order to better serve legal English teaching, the evaluation of legal English coursebooks has its own value. In this paper, 10 existing legal English coursebooks have been chosen for the evaluation, in order to find out the basic situations and major problems of the present legal English coursebooks, which may offer some insightful implications for the development of legal English coursebooks.In this paper the author will offer the general background information of the present legal English teaching, describe the present situations of legal English coursebooks and point out the urgency and importance of good legal English coursebooks; then some basic concepts related to coursebook evaluation and the summary of the foreign and domestic evaluation theories have been provided; then the details of the research methods and research procedures are illustrated, among which needs analysis and coursebook analysis are the two most important tools; afterwards the author would compare the data acquired from needs analysis and those from coursebook analysis to make a preliminary evaluation of the 10 chosen legal English coursebooks and then come to the conclusion, in which some implications will be offered for the better development of legal English coursebooks where LE coursebook needs a scientific uniform syllabus and different coursebooks should be designed for different leareners. At last some limitations of this research have been pointed out and deeper studies of legal English evaluation is needed in the future.