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This study analyses the communicative competencies of civil servants in Kazakhstan, highlighting the crucial role of effective communication in fostering public trust and enhancing democratic engagement. Utilizing qualitative focus group discussions with 32 experts, the research identified key deficiencies, including reliance on bureaucratic language, a lack of empathy, and inadequate crisis communication skills. These issues underscore the pressing need for communication strategies tailored to the Kazakhstani context. The study points to the necessity of developing Kazakhstan-specific communication frameworks and emphasizes the importance of improving training programs and promoting emotional intelligence among civil servants. By enhancing internal communication processes and clarifying responsibilities, government employees can better serve the public, fostering a more transparent, responsive, and participatory government. This research offers a valuable foundation for future initiatives aimed at refining the communicative competencies of civil servants in Kazakhstan, suggesting pathways for implementing targeted improvements and developing more effective communication practices within the public sector. Through these efforts, the study aims to contribute to the creation of a government that not only addresses public needs more efficiently but also actively engages citizens in the democratic process, ultimately strengthening the relationship between the state and its people.

New technologies could facilitate new ways of cheating. This emerging scenario places academic integrity policy in higher education institutions as critical. Academic integrity scholars have designed conceptual frameworks to analyze academic integrity policy. The body of the literature on academic integrity policy analysis includes studies developed in North America, Europe, and Australia. However, insight into several regions of the world is lacking. This pioneering study in the Chilean context analyzes documents addressing academic integrity at forty-three accredited universities. Using a qualitative research design, we framed this policy analysis in the five core elements of exemplary academic integrity policy: access, approach, responsibility, detail, and support. The findings revealed challenges with accessing documents online, a strong presence of legal language that might not be understandable to all students, and a scarcity of information about review cycles. The punitive approach was prevalent, with a significant focus on students' conduct. Signs of collaboration and mechanisms for promoting academic integrity cultures were nearly absent. The documents primarily targeted students and the roles of other stakeholders concentrated on the enforcement of sanctions and misconduct investigations. The analysis also showed the use of general definitions to describe academic integrity breaches, inconsistency across the system in defining plagiarism and a lack of guidance to address contract cheating and unauthorized use of generative artificial intelligence. The findings also highlighted the unavailability of institutional support to teach, learn, and research with integrity or references to research-based practices. We propose twelve practical recommendations for policymakers and academic integrity advocates.

Rural adolescents are at risk for firearm-related injury and death. In response, professional organizations have called for communication between adolescents, parents, and providers about firearms. A shared understanding of firearms between providers and families can facilitate effectiveness of health interventions. However, few studies engage adolescents in identifying their perception of common firearm terminology. The current study aimed to understand how adolescents in rural communities defined firearm-related terms including firearm, carrying, and handling, and differences in terms based on prior firearm training. Data were from a mixed methods community-based participatory study of 93 adolescents from rural Washington state. Thematic qualitative coding identified themes for firearm (gun, weapon, projectile, and tool), carrying (on you/your person, transportation, and holding), and handling (actively using, safe use, and holding) and differences between those with prior firearms training. Findings provide insight into perceptions of firearm-related terms for adolescents, an often-neglected voice, and inform rural policy and prevention efforts.

This paper compares website usability--specifically library users' understanding of library terms--for fifty-one original research studies between 2012-2021, with the findings of John Kupersmith's 2011 white paper "Library Terms That Users Understand." Studies reported approximately twice as many terms that users didn't understand than terms users did understand, with some terms appearing in both categories. Analysis of the findings suggests a majority of Kupersmith's guidelines remain applicable to today's online environment, with some adjustments related to technology advances. We propose an additional guideline that acknowledges the role non-library websites play in guiding how users interact with library terminology.

Word stress instruction has increasingly become a focus among EFL teachers. Owing to the phonological differences between the learner's first language and English, EFL learners of different nationalities encounter varying degrees of difficulty when pronouncing English polysyllabic words. The majority of EFL students studying medicine tend to find it particularly challenging to pronounce English polysyllabic medical terms correctly. To gain better insights into this issue, this study aims to assess Thai medical students' ability to correctly mark stress in English polysyllabic medical terms and to analyze their errors in identifying their stressed syllables. A purposive sampling was employed to recruit seventy-five mixed-ability first year medical students enrolled in the course entitled "Foundation English for Medical Profession II" of the academic year 2020 in a public university in Thailand to participate in the study. The participants were asked to pronounce 40 medical terms via Zoom, and the quantitative data were analyzed statistically. Nine students of mixed English ability took part in the semi-structured interviews, and thematic analysis was employed to analyze the qualitative data. In light of the key findings, pedagogical implications and recommendations are discussed and highlighted in the study, which found it evident that word stress instruction should be integrated in the EAP/ESP courses for medical students either as part of the core lessons or through supplementary online resources.

Curriculum change and the ready access to school level appropriate statistical software has seen the focus of statistical practice for novice statisticians move from primarily constructing graphs and calculating statistics to describing and reasoning from distributions. Many multi-faceted concepts and statistical ideas underpin distributions, which students find difficult to navigate and cognitively coordinate. Limited research, however, exists on how to enhance students' communication when describing distributions. This paper explores the actions of a teacher as she supported 14-15-year-old students to develop notions of distribution and to describe distributions. The findings indicated that the teacher, through knowing, modelling, and listening, supported the development of student statistical language and communication. Students, through engaging in specifically designed instructional activities to engineer learning around the concept of distribution, seem to be able to transition from using their own language to using statistical language to describe distributions that communicated the concepts and features that were identified in the distribution description framework.

This study aimed to (1) elaborate on microblogging-based instruction, which was built on social media platform X and designed based on the four phases of the design-based research (DBR) framework (Amiel and Reeves in J Educ Technol Soc 11(4):29-40, https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.11.4.29, 2008); (2) put microblogging-based instruction into practice in a medical English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course; (3) examine students' perceptions of the pedagogical value of X platform usage on their learning experiences; and (4) investigate how well microblogging-based instruction enhances the students' specialised-language performance. On the basis of the four phases of the DBR framework, a study was conducted with students studying a medical ESP course to identify the problems in the teaching practices used in ESP courses. To improve the identified problems, following the second phase, social media platform X was used to supplement ESP face-to-face instruction. Three tasks were designed for the students to do on X. These tasks were implemented and assessed on 19 EFL first-year premedical undergraduate students over 16 weeks at a university in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Data collected from the students included a copy version of the ESP final test, a questionnaire, and semi- structured interviews. The results revealed that X-based instruction improved students' ability to use medicine-specialised language, offered opportunities for students to become more familiar with medicine-specific terms, perceived ability in using writing and reading skills, collaborative learning, and generated thoughtful discussions outside the confines of the classroom. However, the students' inadequate knowledge of the specialised subject, the stress of making X mandatory, and log- in overload remain key challenges against the effective appropriation of X use in an ESP context.

There is a vast literature on "executive functioning," or the control of one's thoughts and actions in pursuit of a goal. This broad construct is conceptualized as comprising multiple executive functions (EFs) that support academic achievement and other important life outcomes. However, there is a lack of consensus regarding what, exactly, these core EFs are. This commentary briefly reviews a few dominant models of EFs in developmental and cognitive psychology and outlines issues to be addressed; it then illustrates how insights from neuroscience could help us eliminate redundant terminology and identify EFs that have been largely overlooked. Reaching a consensus regarding the core set of EFs will inform efforts to scaffold EF development and improve educational outcomes.

General spectroscopy is known to be difficult for novice students due to its complex and abstract nature. In this study we used a first-year chemistry Mini Spec laboratory activity to uncover language barriers to student learning in spectroscopy. Analysis revealed that language barriers generated conceptual difficulties for English as Second Language (ESL) students. As well as demonstrating difficulty with understanding of the origin of spectral lines identified in prior research, this work surfaces previously unreported language difficulties which were characterized in terms of technical and non-technical language. These include observations that 'refract' and 'diffract' appeared poorly delineated for students, the teleological animism of 'jump' to describe excited electron transitions towards the ground state, and the non-technical term 'discrete' being difficult for students to understand and construct meaning for. In addition to this, students battled with the symbolic language required to depict the formation of spectral lines. Several solutions to the language difficulty are proposed including the re-sequencing of macroscopic, sub-microscopic and symbolic teaching and reconsidering the usefulness of certain non-technical terms for teaching and learning spectroscopy.

To enable students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation to read, identify the lexical and syntactic features of legal documents and hence comprehend their content, this article proposes an instructional module for teaching English for Legal Purposes (ELP). The module should be based on the assessment of the students' proficiency level in English and analysis of their academic and professional need. It consists of the most common legal terms such as (alias, amicus, peosequi, res judicata, puisine, puis ne, estoppel fee, simple laches, quash); grammatical structures common in legal documents such as the use of long and complex sentences, conditional clauses, adverbial clusters, long complicated nominal groups, the modal auxiliary shall, and French word order (court martial, heir apparent, secretary general); reading legal documents such as insurance policies, wills, statutes, contracts and agreements between individuals, leases, petitions, investigations...etc. Global legal themes are integrated in the practice material. The students practice listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. They learn the legal terms and grammatical structures in context (through the text). The instructor performs text analysis. Together with the students, she goes through a legal text, locates legal terms and syntactic structures, and explains and/or translates them. Then the students perform text analysis of new legal texts. Numerous technologies can be integrated into teaching and learning ELP. Assignments are posted on Blackboard LMS, a blog or a social media page. At the end of the instructional period, the students are tested, and the ELP module is evaluated by the students and legal translation instructors. The article recommends that ELP be student-centered. The students should have an active role in the learning process where they select legal topics to read, talk, write about and translate.

Decades of research has suggested that completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) can be a complex, difficult process for postsecondary students and their support networks. However, no extant research has informed federal student aid practitioners and researchers as to what federal student aid jargon terms institutions of higher education actually use in their application instructions to complete the FAFSA. To fill this gap in the research, this study adopts a distributional linguistic approach to analyze a random sample of federal student aid application instructions published on institutional websites (.edu) over three years (2017, 2018, and 2019) to learn how prevalent Federal Student Aid (FSA) Glossary terms are and what terms are used most frequently. Results suggest few of the 152 FSA Glossary terms have been regularly used by institutions of higher education from 2017 to 2019, with the most frequent terms being FAFSA, loan, federal student aid, FSA ID, and scholarship. In addition, many institutions only used one or two FSA Glossary terms over three years, bringing into question the accuracy and relevance of the FSA Glossary. Implications for research, financial aid administration, and financial aid policy are addressed.

This qualitative study investigates the changes and continuities in conceptions of teaching and learning from course commencement to course completion for a group of international preservice teachers undertaking a two-year Masters-level degree in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Data were collected through a series of graphic elicitation activities and ranking tasks at baseline and endpoint. Findings indicate that there was: a growing emphasis on student engagement and its linkages to student learning; a shift from viewing teaching as the transfer of knowledge to learning as an active process; and a more developed repertoire of professional language to explain what is valued and why. This study provides valuable insights into international pre-service teachers' evolving conceptions of teaching and learning. These findings suggest that international pre-service teachers need many opportunities to interrogate and refine their understanding of teaching and learning and how this applies to the contexts in which they will teach.

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for" (Wittgenstein). When learning something completely new, we connect the unknown term to an already existing part of our knowledge. We can only build new ideas and insights upon an existing conceptual foundation. In the field of statistics, we educators frequently find ourselves met with great confusion when teaching novices. These students, entirely unfamiliar with even basic statistics, must connect the introduced statistical terms within their personal existing networks of largely non-statistical knowledge. Lecturers, on the other hand, who are well versed in statistics, have deeply internalized the content to be taught and its relevant context. The juxtaposition of the two roles may produce amusement in a lecturer upon gaining insight into the word associations made by the statistical novices. For example, a 'logistic regression' does not involve the 'shipping of goods in economically difficult times,' though this might seem entirely reasonable and intuitive to the statistics learner. Other times, these different perspectives can lead to headaches and frustration for both learners and their lecturers. In this article, we illustrate how simple statistical terms are initially connected to a student's pre-exiting knowledge and how these associations change after completing an introductory course in applied statistics. Furthermore, we emphasize the important difference between "term", "approach", and "context". Understanding this fundamental distinction may help improve the communication between the lecturer and the learner. We offer a collection of practical tools for instructors to help promote students' conceptual understanding in a supportive, mutually-beneficial learning environment.

Since 2012, many Title IV institutions of higher education have sent their students debt letters to inform them of their outstanding loan amounts, estimated or real monthly payments, and other loan-related information. However, no extant research has analyzed whether these letters are written at an appropriate level for college students, nor has research articulated what complex jargon is used in these letters (e.g., "subsidized," "consolidated") and what content is contained in these letters (e.g., interest rates, loan types). Subsequently, this study analyzes a sample of 24 letters gathered from institutions of higher education across the country to fill these research gaps. Results suggest most debt letters are not comprehensible by the average first-or second-year college student, jargon differs between sectors (e.g., public, private), and debt letters share many common elements, such as aggregate loan totals and interest rates, but many do not include contact information or any multimedia, even though letters were written to be delivered digitally. Implications for research, practice, and financial aid communication are addressed.

An online intro-to-proof course provided an unexpected opportunity for a series of email exchanges that yielded insights into one student's mathematical thinking and the ambiguous role of mathematical jargon in miscuing this student's reasoning. The jargon deals with the notation [limit value of a function], which encapsulates multiple conceptual meanings: the process of taking the limit, the question of if the limit exists, and if the limit exists, its value. As a matter of jargon, the statement [limit value of a function] = L was used in context for L to retain these multiple meanings, so L no longer represented merely a value. In computational calculus, this is of no consequence but in a course involving limit proofs, it led to confusion.

In this article, we describe and analyze the experience of undergraduate chemistry students who scripted episodes of a science podcast for non-expert audiences. This practice aimed to improve public communication of science and technology, often suppressed throughout science careers but relevant for developing critical thinking. In particular, the script analysis focused on writing strategies used by students to promote suitability to the target audience. In this process, the students were responsible for searching for themes, scripting, and submitting episodes to a local radio station to record and broadcast. We compare feedback from students, experts, and listeners, showing an influence of current issues; a prevalence of interlocution, colloquialism, and apposition as language features; an awareness of using jargon; and a suitability to non-experts.

Several studies have revealed that computer applications offer a vast potential for teaching and learning. Open Educational Resources (OERs) can be especially beneficial to generate innovative abilities in the classroom related to new means of communication and collaboration (Conole and Alevizou, 2010). As regards the teaching of foreign languages, OERs have been acknowledged to be a useful tool for vocabulary acquisition (Barbule?, 2013), for enhancing text reading (Alkahtani, 1999), for writing (Krajka, 2000), and for improving pronunciation (Lee, 2008). Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) programmes as a means of learning-by-playing in the classroom have also proven to facilitate the acquisition of English vocabulary and pronunciation through games (Young & Wang, 2014). This study aims to explore the implementation and use of an online tool such as "Wordclouds" in the English for Psychology classroom at university in order to improve vocabulary retention and the overall learning of English in the specific field of Psychology. By means of exposing students to psychological pathologies, they will be asked to generate vocabulary word clouds to check their vocabulary retention and keyword selections at two different stages, being exposed to specialised texts before and after the reading of those texts later. Computer applications in the ESP classroom are combined here with group work development. Previous research has shown that working collaboratively facilitates learning, primarily through comparative reflection and peer learning (Angehrn & Maxwell, 2009; Evans & Cuffe, 2009). Results have shown that the exploitation of students' background knowledge through the tool "Wordclouds" has definitely aided vocabulary retention of keywords about psychological pathologies as well as improved their English for psychology language accuracy.

This study assessed prospective first-generation college students' knowledge of federal student aid. The research team surveyed 752 prospective first-generation college students to assess what financial aid jargon terms were unfamiliar. Students often reported "FAFSA," "master promissory note," "entrance counseling," "data retrieval tool," and "non-filer's" statement as unfamiliar. Controlling for demographics, non-binary conforming first-generation college students reported financial aid jargon terms at a higher rate than peers (p=0.05, t=2.42). Implications for student affairs and financial aid praxis are addressed.

In this research an instrument was developed to measure students' anxiety about the jargon of physics. Levels of anxiety were then compared with student content performance and general classroom anxiety. Anxiety levels were also compared based on students' language of origin (native vs. nonnative English speaking students). Statistical analyses indicated that the created instrument was reliable and that a larger percentage of students admitted that the vocabulary of physics creates anxiety in their physics learning and that fear of communication apprehension was prevalent than fear of peer evaluation. There was a negative but small correlation between anxiety about physics vocabulary and student course performance. The correlation between anxiety about physics vocabulary and general classroom anxiety was moderate. There was no significant difference in levels of anxiety between native and nonnative English-speaking students. A comparison between results of this research and previous studies (theories) sheds more light into the implications for conducting studies relating to academic anxiety.

This study aims to identify technical words in research articles across sub-disciplines in computer science field. A corpus of research articles in computer science was constructed, comprised of 10,450,035 running words from 1045 research articles across ten sub-disciplines of computer science. The technical word List for research articles in computer science was created by the methods of computer-based analysis and the rating scales. 769 technical word types were identified and listed in Appendix A. The computer science field-oriented technical words list is expected to meet the needs of learners in this field.

While there has been considerable research on students with special educational needs and their parents' participation at individual subject curriculum (ISC) meetings at school, less attention has been paid to their perception of the dialogue between students and professionals. The aim of this study has been to investigate whether the dialogue taking place in ISC meetings is deliberative. The data for this study are based on individual, semi-structured interviews with 12 Norwegian lower secondary school students with specific learning difficulties, and 10 parents. Findings show that the professionals' use of technical jargon made it challenging for students to share their views in the dialogue, as they did not understand everything being said. Moreover, findings show that professionals only exceptionally asked to know the students' views. The study shows that the levels of student agency is poor and needs to be addressed.

Research reproducibility is essential for scientific development. Yet, rates of reproducibility are low. As increasingly more research relies on computers and software, efforts for improving reproducibility rates have focused on making research products digitally available, such as publishing analysis workflows as computer code, and raw and processed data in computer readable form. However, research products that are digitally available are not necessarily friendly for learners and interested parties with little to no experience in the field. This renders research products unapproachable, counteracts their availability, and hinders scientific reproducibility. To improve both short- and long-term adoption of reproducible scientific practices, research products need to be made approachable for learners, the researchers of the future. Using a case study within evolutionary biology, we identify aspects of research workflows that make them unapproachable to the general audience: use of highly specialized language; unclear goals and high cognitive load; and lack of trouble-shooting examples. We propose principles to improve the unapproachable aspects of research workflows and illustrate their application using an online teaching resource. We elaborate on the general application of these principles for documenting research products and teaching materials, to provide present learners and future researchers with tools for successful scientific reproducibility. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Courses: Health Communication, Science Communication, Interpersonal Communication. Objective: This activity prepares students to explain jargon effectively when communicating with individuals who have low health literacy by utilizing clear communication strategies.

The aim of this study was to identify, classify and describe different types of vernacular misconceptions assessed with the items used in a study named "Laboratory of Thinking," Diagnosis of Science Education in Poland. We provide an outline of contemporary conceptual change theories and establish a typology of misconceptions where it was distinguished as amphibological, pseudodeictic, hypernimical-hyponimical and contextual ones. The vernacular misconceptions arise when students' experience problems with the usage of certain scientific language phrases and they may appear in people of all ages, professions and backgrounds. Selected items, together with their detailed description are discussed as well as the possible influence of misconceptions on the students' learning process.

This study, focusing on reflectivity in language teacher education, was conducted with the participation of 35 preservice teachers studying at the ELT Department of Cukurova University, Turkey, in 2017-2018 academic year. The study examined the effects of jargon books (JBs) on preservice language teachers by delving into levels of reflectivity. The two sets of data of the study were collected from jargon book content and face-to-face semi-structured interviews, and display the very fact that preservice teachers mostly reflected upon course-related issues at the first and second levels, and slightly less at the third, most reflective level. Also, the findings suggest that the process of jargon book keeping was perceived as mostly positive but not free from negativity. This study has some important implications for teacher education programs and pertaining stakeholders.

The edTPA Teacher Performance Assessment was implemented at a regional public university to replace the previous paper-and-pencil assessment of teacher candidates' teaching effectiveness. To determine the teacher educators' impressions of using the edTPA as an assessment of readiness to teach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 full-time teacher educators from 11 content areas. Findings consisted of a wide range of responses to the edTPA,from deep edTPA integration to a surface level implementation of the assessment tool. Both positive and negative impressions were found during edTPA implementation in regard to the advantages and disadvantages of the edTPA instrument.

"Academic language" is a term that is thrown around frequently in educational circles, particularly in recent years. As a part of a larger study investigating trends in practitioners' efficacy in teaching, using, and supporting academic language in classrooms, the authors honed in on teachers' definitions and corresponding understandings of the term academic language. The authors surveyed 332 teachers spanning 26 schools in the same geographic region of one large, urban public school district. Though the larger study collected both quantitative and qualitative data, this paper focuses on teachers' survey responses to a question asking them to define academic language in their own words. Overall, 84% of coded responses reflected misunderstandings of academic language. Eight categories of conceptions emerged from the data, including academic language as: (1) the language of schools; (2) vocabulary; (3) the opposite of social language; (4) the language of textbooks; (5) prerequisite to learning; (6) the language of teachers; (7) needed primarily for ELs; and (8) only occurring in English. The purpose of this article is to deconstruct these emergent conceptions of academic language. The authors' goal is to encourage teachers, leaders, teacher educators, and other readers to probe their own understandings of academic language. The article is organized by the eight assertions that respond to the emergent conceptions of academic language, presented in order based on the percentage of teachers who responded and reflected that misunderstanding. For each assertion, the authors share study findings and deconstruct the related conception, using examples from social studies education to demonstrate the complexity of academic language in discipline-specific settings.

Reading research in K-12 English-speaking contexts reveals that inferential and expository texts cause substantial difficulty for students but less such research exists regarding other languages. It was the purpose of this quantitative cloze-based study to expose any relationship between student difficulty and particular features of the Arabic used in a mandatory Saudi Year 10 Physics textbook. Findings reveal that: (a) These 360 female students appear to be having significant difficulty understanding their textbook. (b) Nouns seem to cause the greatest difficulty, followed by technical- and semi-technical words; adjectives and grammatical particles. (c) Prior knowledge did not appear to reduce reading difficulties. This textbook may present difficulties for such students that go beyond the obvious issues of technicality in Physics text. This is significant because it suggests that the broader language difficulties that seem to characterise science text in English may also be emerging in specialist Arabic.

In an attempt to enhance learners' autonomy and create awareness of their own learning process, keeping a vocabulary notebook can be regarded as one of the most commonly used cognitive strategies. A jargon book, a kind of vocabulary notebook, consists of specialized terms that are used for conveying hidden meanings accepted and understood in a specific field. Researchers draw attention to the need for carrying out some studies on vocabulary notebooks to examine their effectiveness more closely. Therefore, the present study investigates the practices and perceptions of pre-service English language teachers on the strategy of keeping a jargon book. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview, an open-ended questionnaire and focus-group interviews. The findings indicate that most of the participants exhibit positive attitudes towards the strategy of keeping a jargon book. The present study implies that the strategy of keeping a vocabulary notebook can be incorporated to the classes of pre-service English language teachers in order to make them familiar with the specialized terms found in the field of English language teacher education.

Purpose: The author is interested in how international (migrant) pre-service teachers use their educational background knowledge and worldviews to make sense of the educational system, the pedagogy and of power relations between staff members in the hosting country. The author seeks to unveil their understanding of successful intellectual integration and their strategies to navigate social, conceptual and pedagogical obstacles. Design/methodology/approach: The author draws on the concept of "intercultural competence" to analyse how international STEM pre-service teachers respond to the challenges and opportunities of integration in the English system. A total of 18 participants were interviewed in focus groups in London to find out about their perceptions of the course and attitudes during their training journey. Five hours of audio recording were transcribed and a thematic analysis was carried out. Findings: International STEM pre-service teachers experience challenges to intellectual integration, including understanding the new school culture, school structure, teaching methodologies and the use of specialist terminologies. However, they show little concern about networking and relations of power. Practical implications: Mentors and tutors should not assume school systems are the same everywhere. Support from university tutors and school mentors must take into consideration that international students will very likely hold ethnocentric views. Mentors, tutors and pre-service teachers would benefit very much from bespoke support to help international students to integrate in a new educational system. Originality/value: Very little has been reported on the experience of international STEM pre-service teachers in England, particularly those with no previous teaching experience. The objective of this study is to address this gap and contribute to the internationalisation of teacher training curricula.

Virtual reality (VR) has garnered increasing attention as a pedagogical tool for language learning. Yet, despite the many affordances of using virtual reality learning environments (VRLEs), there remains a paucity of research investigating the use of VRLEs for English for academic purposes (EAP). While BALEAP '19 conference presentations related to VR were well attended, suggesting there is interest in VR and EAP, many practitioners and researchers may be hesitant to explore using VR for EAP due to difficulties in selecting suitable equipment, understanding VR related terminology, and selecting or creating appropriate VRLEs for their pedagogical and research purposes. The objective of this article is to reduce the difficulty of some of these initial obstacles by providing overviews of relevant literature, VR terminology, technology, and software, as well as providing examples of potential uses of VR for EAP and a framework for investigating VR in EAP pedagogy and research.

The technical language of behavior analysis is arguably necessary to share ideas and research with precision among each other. However, it can hinder effective implementation of behavior analytic techniques when it prevents clear communication between the supervising behavior analyst and behavior technicians. The present paper provides a case example of the development of a shared vocabulary, using plain English when possible, among supervisors and supervisees at a large public school district in which behavior analytic services were provided for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. A list of terms and definitions are provided as well as suggestions on how to develop shared vocabularies within the readers' own service provision context.

This study investigated the potential of discipline-related television programs as sources for incidental learning of specialized vocabulary used in university lectures and seminars. First, a Medical Spoken Word List (MSWL) of 895 specialized word types was developed from a 556,074-word corpus of medical lectures and seminars based on a mixed method: corpus-driven analysis, specialized dictionary checking, and expert ratings. Then, an 11,036,771-word corpus of 37 medical television programs was developed and analyzed to examine the extent to which the MSWL words were encountered in these programs. Adopting 5 encounters or more, 10 encounters or more, 15 encounters or more, and 20 encounters or more as the frequency cutoff points at which incidental learning may happen, this study found that the number of MSWL words that met these cutoff points increased as the number of episodes, seasons, and programs increased. This indicates that discipline-related television programs are potential sources for incidental learning of specialized vocabulary used in lectures and seminars if these programs are watched regularly and in a sequential order.

It has been stated that a criterion of a threshold concept is that it is troublesome or difficult to understand. However, not all difficult concepts are also threshold concepts. This article explores this difference through the context of students' difficulties in learning prosthetics and two models of describing threshold concepts. Students and staff at two UK universities teaching prosthetics and orthotics participated in interviews and questionnaires. Data were analysed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach. Five themes of difficulty emerged from the data, two of which were difficult concepts and three of which were difficult and threshold concepts. These themes involved issues with numbers, the human body, disciplinary language, gait and a holistic perspective. The differentiation was that threshold concepts involved both conceptual and ontological transformation and the use of procedural concepts with associated memories in order to develop disciplinary ways of viewing a concept.

A one-hour guided discourse was designed to support developing the outreach communication skills of physics experts with middle school students. The participants consisted of 12 physics researchers who conduct research in the field of nanoscale science and technology (NST). The guided discourse consisted of a professional development task for preparing the researchers to communicate their NST research. Each scientist was presented with two sets of concepts (NST essential concepts and middle school physics concepts) using a visual board and was asked to find connections between them. Before and after linking the two sets of concepts, the scientists were invited to describe their research. The findings showed that a change had taken place in the concepts the scientists used to describe their research: an increased use of concepts from middle school physics and a decreased use of complex scientific jargon. A qualitative examination of the results revealed different types of participants, based on the way the scientists were influenced by the task. Each of the three types of science communicators is presented as a case study. We suggest that this task can be applied to prepare scientists to communicate with middle school students.

In this opinion piece I reflect on an inspiring 2019 Advance HE STEM conference in Birmingham. In doing so I identify the term pedagogy as one aspect which ran contrary to the noble aspirations of the conference. I outline my own perspective as both an insider and outsider in my role of a Teacher-Practitioner. I use this vantage point to outline the background to the term pedagogy together with its suggested alternatives. I review the roots of the word itself to suggest that instead of overusing the term pedagogy, we should focus more on the "journey" of education we are privileged to share with our students.

Educational standards and instructional frameworks aim to foster students' scientific literacy, especially their conceptual knowledge. Previous research has examined several instructional approaches to foster students' conceptual learning. Reliable and adequate use of technical terms in science instruction is also essential for fostering students' conceptual learning. However, current studies of the analyses of the use of technical terms and their effects on fostering students' conceptual understanding in biology lessons are lacking. In this study, we first conducted a descriptive analysis of the technical terms used in selected videotaped German 9th-grade biology lessons (N = 43) on neurobiology. Then, we conducted multilevel analyses of the effects of using different technical terms in a biology lesson on students' achievement and situational interest. Our descriptive results showed that on average teachers (N = 43) talked more and used more technical terms compared to their students and that many different technical terms were used in our analysed lessons. Furthermore, our multilevel analyses showed negative effects of using a high number of different technical terms on both student outcome variables. We conclude that a well-considered, but simple, reduction of technical terms in biology lessons could positively affect students' learning of conceptual knowledge. Therefore, the findings in this study have implications that teachers should use minimally necessary topic-relevant technical terms in biology instruction with the additional use of biological core ideas. We suggest further research in pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes to evaluate teachers' effective use of technical terms in biology lessons essential for fostering conceptual learning.

One of the problematic features of the "skills discourse" is the view that skills are decontextualized bits of knowledge and disposition. Instead, how skills such as communication are defined and used are shaped by cultural, political, and situational factors. In this article, we integrate theory from communication studies, critical discourse analysis, and cognitive anthropology to examine how 96 students, educators, and employers in nursing and engineering define and describe communication skills. Thematic and social network analyses revealed multiple "genres" of communication, their association with specific situations, variation in the structure of situated notions of communication by role group, and cultural models underlying their use. Results suggest new approaches for research and practice regarding teaching and cultural diversity in higher education.

Mastery of jargon terms is an important part of student learning in biology and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains. In two experiments, we investigated whether prelecture quizzes enhance memory for jargon terms, and whether that enhanced familiarity can facilitate learning of related concepts that are encountered during subsequent lectures and readings. Undergraduate students enrolled in neuroanatomy and physiology courses completed 10-minute low-stakes quizzes with feedback on jargon terms either online (experiment 1) or using in-class clickers (experiment 2). Quizzes occurred before conventional course instruction in which the terms were used. On exams occurring up to 12 weeks later, we observed improved student performance on questions that targeted memory of previously quizzed jargon terms and their definitions relative to questions on terms that were not quizzed. This pattern occurred whether those questions were identical (experiment 1) or different (experiment 2) from those used during quizzing. Benefits of jargon quizzing did not consistently generalize, however, to exam questions that assessed conceptual knowledge but not necessarily jargon knowledge. Overall, this research demonstrates that a brief and easily implemented jargon-quizzing intervention, deliverable via Internet or in-class platforms, can yield substantial improvements in students' course-relevant scientific lexica, but does not necessarily impact conceptual learning.

Different from other elaborate proses, academic writing needs a clear language to extend its scope of audience. Intending to be seen intellectual, competent, or more attractive, writers may inflate their manuscripts with unnecessary complicated words and pompous frills unique to specific jargons; however, such texts, called flowery writing, in an attempt to sound important or possibly gloriously elegant only create a viscous language hard to follow, ending with texts strangling in meaningless jargon that needs to be deciphered by readers with considerable effort. Obviously, the reader whose aim is simply to get a piece of information may become easily confused and irritated after a time of chasing the meaning of words inside an overwrought prose. Therefore, now that the primary purpose of a scientific writing is to reach audiences, and a simplified statement would just do fine to achieve that; why do we use a flowery language that is difficult to decode? This study investigated introduction and conclusion parts of a hundred research articles written in English by Turkish speakers, and picked up unnecessary complicated words, phrases and sentences. In addition, some pedagogical implications regarding the importance of being plain in academic writing were suggested particularly for non-native writers of English.

The excessive "jargon" load in biology may be a hurdle for developing conceptual understanding as well as achieving core competencies such as scientific literacy and communication. Little work has been done to characterize student understanding of biology-specific jargon. To address this issue, we aimed to determine the types of biology jargon terms that students struggle with most, the alignment between students' perceived understanding and performance defining the terms, and common errors in student-provided definitions. Students in two biology classes were asked to report their understanding of, and provide definitions for, course-specific vocabulary terms: 1276 student responses to 72 terms were analyzed. Generally, students showed an overestimation of their own understanding. The least accurate self-assessment occurred for terms to which students had substantial prior exposure and terms with discordant meanings in biology versus everyday language. Students were more accurate when assessing their understanding of terms describing abstract molecular structures, and these were often perceived as more difficult than other types of terms. This research provides insights about which types of technical vocabulary may create a barrier to developing deeper conceptual understanding, and highlights a need to consider student understanding of different types of jargon in supporting learning and scientific literacy.