ABSTRACT
‘Group work’ is one of the trinity of primary school teaching methods, along with whole-class and individual work, which is endorsed in many official publications. One of the benefits of group work is that it can offer the opportunity for participants to develop social and language skills. Perhaps such benefits were never available to the prisoner who stayed in the court cells while his lawyer presented a dock brief. During the case the lawyer was sent below to interview his client and returned to the court to inform the judge, ‘My Lord, my client is a man of few words and so far he has favoured me with only two’.
