“Forensic files” for forensic students, and more

Abstract

The paper focuses on the benefits of introducing authentic video episodes into university classroom. Watching “Forensic Files”, a popular US documentary-style series about experts cracking crimes promotes forensic students’ language proficiency. The 20-minute long episodes serve as a spring-board for expanding students’ general lexis and building professional vocabulary, give ground for comparison of culturally specific ways of forensic experts’ investigation, provide ideas for group discussions, and further on for academic writing. The series proved to be an effective tool for developing of the 4 skills with non-linguistic students in general. Depending on the objective set, the English teacher can train the students next to everything: grammar, thematic word groups, idioms, link-words, a logical paraphrase, you name it.