Established in June 2010, the Research Center for Legal English Teaching and Testing of China University of Political Science and Law is an off-the-payroll research institute of CUPL. The Center conducts teaching reform experiments based on researches on existing problems in the current legal English teaching, and focuses on training a group of qualified legal English teachers and developing effective legal English teaching methods. The Center further improves legal English teaching by analyzing the China National Legal English Certificate Test (LEC test). Taken into consideration the actual needs of foreign-related legal units for legal English talents, the Center aims at improving the teaching and testing of legal English, and providing a new language assessment standard for law schools in the United States and Canada to enroll Chinese students.
The Center has 36 full-time and part-time researchers, mainly from the fields of law and foreign languages and literature at home and abroad. All these researchers have fruitful achievements and rich knowledge in both theories and practices. Talents like them will promote the combination of production, learning and research and smoothly transforms research results of the Center into practical achievements.
In recent years, researchers of the Center have successively undertaken provincial and ministerial-level scientific research projects in the field of legal English, such as the Humanities and Social Sciences Project funded by the Ministry of Education and other projects funded by the Ministry of Justice. The Center has held more than ten national legal English teachers’ workshops in cooperation with Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP), Peking University Press and other organizations, achieving good social effects. The Center will continue to build a platform for academic communication among researchers in relevant fields and to transform theoretical research results into legal practices. The Research Center for Legal English Teaching and Testing of CUPL aims at eventually becoming the cornerstone of legal English teaching and research in China.
