We examined Professional Learning Communities in university settings and their association with teacher job satisfaction. The findings revealed that Professional Learning-Academic Communities (PLACs), 1) were negatively associated with job burnout and positively contributed to job satisfaction, and 2) served dual roles that aligned with the Job Demands-Resources model. These results suggest that PLACs can be considered valuable for promoting teachers' job satisfaction.

In recent decades, members of the general public have become increasingly reliant on findings of scientific studies for decision-making. However, scientific writing usually features a heavy use of technical language, which may pose challenges for people outside of the scientific community. To alleviate this issue, plain language summaries were introduced to provide a brief summary of scientific papers in clear and accessible language. Despite increasing attention paid to the research of plain language summaries, little is known about whether these summaries are readable for the intended audiences. Based on a large corpus sampled from six biomedical and life sciences journals, the present study examined the readability and jargon use of plain language summaries and scientific abstracts on a technical level. It was found that (1) plain language summaries were more readable than scientific abstracts, (2) the reading grade levels of plain language summaries were moderately correlated with that of scientific abstracts, (3) researchers used less jargon in plain language summaries than in scientific abstracts, and (4) the readability of and the jargon use in both plain language summaries and scientific abstracts exceeded the recommended threshold for the general public. The findings were discussed with possible explanations. Implications for academic writing and scientific communication were offered.

Lay abstracts are brief descriptions or summaries of research that are targeted at a general audience. They are held as an important means for the research community to provide greater transparency to the general public and to increase visibility of the pertinent research. This study aims to examine the extent to which lay abstracts published in the journal Autism are comprehensible to a lay audience in terms of readability measures. Results showed that lay abstracts published in Autism were more readable than their corresponding abstracts but were less readable than plain English texts (e.g. news reports). To our knowledge, this is probably the first comparative study on the readability of lay abstracts. Possible explanations for and implications of these findings were offered. Lay abstract Research papers are sometimes hard to follow. Lay abstracts give a short account of research papers. However, it is unclear whether lay abstracts are readable to the lay people. This study examined the readability of 570 abstracts and lay abstracts published between 2020 and 2022 in the journal Autism. We found that that lay abstracts are easier to read than abstracts but are harder to read than news reports. The findings suggest that lay abstracts, on average, are hard to read for the lay people. We propose that the journal and its authors may invite reviewers from outside the research community to test whether a lay abstract is readable.

language teachers might encounter in the multilingual world of language teaching and learning because language teachers’ identity also determines the role of language teacher educators to a certain extent. For another, more attention needs to be paid to their lives and work in relation to their multiple identities, particularly in pedagogy, research, and service and leadership (institutional and community). Language teacher educators can find their way forward through the questions Barkhuizen listed in the last section for self-inquiring their own professional experiences and development. In a word, Barkhuizen’s research serves as a starting point for researchers who wish further to examine the lives and identities of language teacher educators.

Lay summaries provide a brief account of scientific articles and are supposed to be written in accessible language. However, it remains largely unknown whether lay summaries are readable to the intended non-technical audience. Here, we present a case study that examines the readability of and the use of technical jargon in lay summaries and their corresponding scientific abstracts collected from the journal Medical Mycology . It was found that (1) the average reading grade level of lay summaries was significantly higher than that of scientific abstracts, and (2) a higher proportion of technical terms were used than the recommended threshold in both lay summaries and scientific abstracts. In other words, improvements are needed to make lay summaries more readable for the non-technical audience. Possible explanations for the findings were discussed and suggestions to enhance the readability of lay summaries were offered.

"The increasing viability of good news." The Social Science Journal, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2 Additional informationFundingThe research work of this review was supported by the Sichuan Office of Philosophy and Social Science under grant number SC22WY002.

Key points Plain language summaries make scientific papers readable to the general public. As researchers are accustomed to communicate in technical language, writing plain language summaries may be a challenging task. We offer specific suggestions to guide researchers in developing plain language summaries.

Communicating science to the general public could sometimes be problematic partly because the language used in scientific writing was difficult to understand for people outside the scientific community. Against this backdrop, lay summaries were introduced to the research community. Lay summaries are short, non-technical summaries of scientific articles that are aimed at a lay audience. Despite the increasing attention on the roles that lay summaries play in scientific communication, it remains unclear whether they are comprehensible to the lay audience. To address the foregoing concerns, this study examines the readability of lay summaries published in Autism Research. It was found that lay summaries were more readable than traditional abstracts but were not easy enough to read for the lay audience. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.

The present study examines college teachers' initial and long-term career motivations. It was found that 1) themes in teachers' reports aligned with dimensions included in the FIT-Choice framework, 2) peak moments (PMs) contributed to long-term career motivation and job satisfaction. We propose that PMs should be considered as a valid dimension to the FIT-Choice scale.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Sichuan Office of Philosophy and Social Science [SC22WY002].

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文章探讨近二十年(2001-2020)教师教育领域SSCI收录期刊发表的学术论文的研究状况,采用文献计量分析及自然语言处理技术追踪国外教师教育的研究趋势、主要出版刊物、最具影响力的文章以及主要研究话题.研究发现:第一,近二十年来,该领域发表的学术论文数量增长明显;第二,刊载教师教育主题论文最多的期刊是Teaching and Teacher Education、Journal of Teacher Education和Journal of Education for Teaching,虽然此三本期刊都是教育类期刊,但部分刊载教师教育领域论文的期刊除了归属教育类以外,还同时归属其他学科门类之下;第三,Korthagen和Darling-Hammond这两位作者各有两篇论文进入Top 20高被引论文;第四,在该研究时间跨度内,有9个教师教育领域的话题吸引了越来越多研究者的关注,另有3个话题越来越不被关注.

The rapid advancement in video technologies in recent years has made the creating and editing of subtitles for a video increasingly feasible. For a long time, however, the pedagogical potentials of subtitling in language teaching and learning have been neglected. To fill this gap, this technology review introduces VisualSubSync, a free and flexible tool for subtitle editing, as a practical instrument to facilitate the teaching of listening and viewing skills. This review first provides an overview of the main features of the software and then discusses the possible benefits it offers to listening and viewing pedagogies in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. Finally, the challenges that teachers and learners may face with subtitling are considered.

Article Christoph Rühlemann: Visual linguistics with R: A practical introduction to quantitative interactional linguistics was published on April 1, 2022 in the journal Folia Linguistica (volume 56, issue 1).