{"id":607,"date":"2010-02-01T17:35:18","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T17:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=607"},"modified":"2010-02-12T17:40:39","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T17:40:39","slug":"english-exam-for-barristers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/01\/english-exam-for-barristers\/","title":{"rendered":"English exam for barristers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019re at court, you would expect the lawyers to be fully conversant and confidently expressing themselves, much as you see in the many American <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Legal_drama#TV_Legal_Dramas\">TV shows<\/a> dedicated to courtroom drama.<\/p>\n<p>A report published in 2008 showed that trainee barristers didn\u2019t think much of their fellow students linguistic abilities, however.<br \/>\nThe <a href=\"http:\/\/www.barstandardsboard.org.uk\/\">Bar Standards Board<\/a> is now introducing a test that aims to get prospective barristers to prove their fluency in English, the Financial Times reports. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The [2008] report highlighted deficiencies among both native and non-native speakers, including an \u201cinability to speak fluently, with close attention to grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and an inability to write clear, correct and well-structured English prose\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The diagnosis is a far cry from the renowned articulacy of legendary advocates such as the fictional Rumpole or the real-life Sir Edward Marshall Hall, whose persuasiveness helped win acquittals for defendants in a series of sensational murder cases during the late Victorian and Edwardian era.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, the islands of inarticulacy among trainee barristers now seem to have grown so large that, as one person put it to the profession\u2019s own investigators: \u201cThe problem is not the course, nor the staff, but the students.\u201d (Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/9f3141b4-0e90-11df-bd79-00144feabdc0.html\">Financial Times<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is definitely one of the professions where excellent linguistic abilities are needed, so hopefully these measures will help safeguard the profession and the system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019re at court, you would expect the lawyers to be fully conversant and confidently expressing themselves, much as you see in the many American TV shows dedicated to courtroom drama. A report published in 2008 showed that trainee barristers didn\u2019t think much of their fellow students linguistic abilities, however. The Bar Standards Board is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3],"tags":[580,577,578,226,581,579,108],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-english","tag-bar-standards-board","tag-barristers","tag-english-exam","tag-financial-times","tag-lawyers","tag-linguistic-ability","tag-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":608,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions\/608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}