Specifity of English law terminology while implementation of the competency-based approach in a foreign language teaching

The article highlights the English law terminology taking into account its specific character in the framework of implementation of the competency-based approach in a foreign language teaching. The main task of law terminology is to reflect the current linguistic, legal, political, economic and cultural trends of modern society. Law terminology, being a link between various fields of knowledge and spheres of human activity, is a complex aspect in a foreign language teaching. The higher education system makes it a priority to train specialists who can translate all written and oral texts. Therefore, teaching of law translation becomes more and more topical and relevant. English legal terms are the most important component of the English language of law, in which, unlike other term systems, there are a huge number of special areas of application. In the article the author defines the concept of “legal term” and envisages the main characteristics of law terminology (unicity, semantic unambiguity, functional stability and consistency), its types, ways of forming new terms and concepts (semantic, morphological and syntactic means), ways to express them in a sentence as well. Special attention is paid to the describing of three main structural types of legal terms formation: root, affixal, and compound. The author gives a description of the most common suffixes (-ship, -ment, -tion, -or/-er, and others), which are used to form legal terms and notions in English. In addition, the author provides examples of legal terms often used in normative documents, which are expressed by using phrases and abbreviations.