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Linguistic Aspects of Pro Se Litigation

Final Report Summary - PRO SE LANGUAGE USE (Linguistic Aspects of Pro Se Litigation)

The Marie Curie Fellow, Dr Tatiana Tkacukova, successfully completed the fellowship and the project at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University, UK. The Marie Curie Fellowship for Professional Development included three types of professional development training: (1) research training, (2) additional research training and (3) complementary training. The research training part of the project dealt with communication challenges of self-represented litigants in adversarial legal proceedings. The additional research training part encompassed professional development in all areas of language and the law and forensic linguistics. Complementary research training involved training in academic soft skills. All project deliverables and milestones were met on time without any complications. Below is the summary of project objectives, main results achieved and potential impact.

(1) Research training objectives
Linguistic aspects of self-representation are multifocal and as such include communicative, turn-taking, politeness and questioning strategies during interaction between lay people and legal professionals. The analysis is based on the linguistic corpus created for the purposes of the project. The corpus consists of 12,338,166 words and is a collection of seven sub-corpora, each based on a court case tried in different jurisdictions (England and Wales, USA and Canada). The development of the corpus and its interdisciplinary use for socio-legal and linguistic purposes is presented in the journal Corpora 10(2).

Quantitative and qualitative analyses conducted on the corpus data have been presented in three articles, five invited lectures, eleven conference presentations, and are currently being finalised for a sole-authored monograph Surviving the Legal Jungle: Litigants in Person and Legal-Lay Communication (to be submitted to Palgrave Pivot). A published article ‘Litigants in Person as Intruders in Court’ in the socio-legal journal Informatica e Diritto 16(1) deals with interaction patterns between self-represented litigants and legal professionals. The article in the journal Corpora 10(2) focuses on theoretical and practical implications of corpus development and the role of judges in semi-represented cases. The third article in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law (forthcoming) presents an innovative way of dealing with communicative, conceptual, cognitive and procedural challenges experienced by lay people during the whole duration of legal proceedings from the very beginning of filling in forms to the final hearings. Once the article is published, the same study will be reported on for the Ministry of Justice Family Justice Research Bulletin.

The project has led to establishing cooperation with several socio-legal research groups, one of which is the Centre for Professional Legal Education and Research at Birmingham Law School. During the period of September – October 2015, Dr Tatiana Tkacukova will be collaborating with Professor Sommerlad and Professor Lee (Birmingham Law School) on a pilot study of litigants in person commissioned by Birmingham Law Society. The final report writing stage is scheduled for completion in October 2015 and the project is likely to lead to influential publications and further funding.

As a result of productive cooperation with the Personal Support Unit in Birmingham and Magistrates’ Association, one of the outcomes of the project is a handbook under the title Communication in the Legal Jungle: Guide for Litigants in Person, which is available on the project web site as a downloadable resource. In collaboration with the Personal Support Unit in Birmingham, the handbook will in the near future be adapted to the needs of litigants in person in family proceedings and made available for the use of the Personal Support Unit clients.
Overall, the research conducted during the project has clear theoretical and practical applications and therefore has potential to produce both further high quality research publications and have significant impact on meeting the needs of self-represented litigants in adversarial legal proceedings as well as on policy in this domain.

(2) Additional research training objectives
Thanks to a varied training and workshop offer at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics and the expertise of individual staff members, the project has led to Dr Tkacukova’s broadening her research areas and initiating new research projects. The new topics include police interviewing techniques of suspects in rape and sexual assault cases (a chapter for the book The Discourse of Police Investigation is currently under preparation with Dr Gavin Oxburgh, Newcastle University); establishing credibility in criminal cases (two papers presented with Dr Isabel Picornell, QED Forensic Linguistics); assessing English language proficiency during police interviews and witness examination (with Dr van Naerssen, Immaculata University, USA); text mining and forensic text analysis for cybersecurity (research proposal submitted with the Department of Information Technologies, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Czech Republic). The new areas will raise the profile of the researcher and help develop further interdisciplinary research projects with clear impact and high quality research outputs.

(3) Complementary training objectives
Complementary training objectives were met as planned and included practical experience with project and finance management; strengthening leadership, organisational and networking skills; enhancing IT related skills; submitting research bids (Bar Council bid with Prof Hilary Sommerlad) and planning funding proposals (ESRC and ERC Starting Grant for 2015/2016); applying for ethical clearance (Ministry of Justice, Civil Justice Centre in Birmingham, Aston University Ethics Committee); delivering outreach activities (Think Tank in Birmingham, Café Scientifique).

In summary, the project has brought four improvements to the original proposal: strengthened interdisciplinary nature of the research and direct collaboration with socio-legal scholars; research outputs presented in socio-legal publications and conferences to increase impact on practitioners and policymakers; stronger outreach activities with clear impact on the wider pubic; initiation of several interdisciplinary research projects with research groups in the UK and abroad. The project achieved all the objectives, enriched the research environment at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics, strengthened the academic expertise of the researcher, Dr Tatiana Tkacukova, and prepared the ground for further high quality research projects with direct impact on the society and the legal community.
The main contacts for the project are Dr Tatiana Tkacukova, t.tkacukova@aston.ac.uk and Prof Tim Grant, t.d.grant@aston.ac.uk.