Abstract

Legal case brief writing is pedagogically important yet insufficiently discussed for Chinese EFL learners majoring in law. Based on process genre approach and discourse information theory (DIT), the present study designs a corpus-based analytical model for Chinese EFL learners’ autonomy in legal case brief writing and explores the process of case brief formation. The results show that in the stages of writing and self-assessment, learners can make full use of the corpus to obtain information, complete macro-information and micro-information output, and self-assess the specific legal register. The findings indicate that the realization of global coherence and local coherence in case briefs depends on discourse information output with appropriate language use. It is hoped that the study will help Chinese EFL learners build information awareness in legal writing and promote their language output and autonomous learning.

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