School rating websites are increasingly used by parents to assess the quality and fit of U.S. K-12 schools for their children. These online reviews often contain detailed descriptions of a school's strengths and weaknesses, which both reflect and inform perceptions of a school. Existing work on these text reviews has focused on finding words or…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is an innovative approach which attempts to comprise holistic features, focusing on the meaning and at the same time providing opportunities for purposeful language use (Dalton-Puffer, 2007). Based on the triptych language of learning, language for learning and language through learning- this program…

In this paper we used natural language processing to review hundreds of thousands of negative student reviews of their teachers submitted to the website RateMyTeacher.com. Our analysis identified several issues raised by students when rating teachers poorly, which adds to the literature that defines "bad teachers" from the student…

The full GLSEN 2021 National School Climate Survey report includes information on LGBTQ middle and high school students' experiences, including: (1) Hearing biased language, from both students and educators; (2) Experiences of harassment and assault; (3) Anti-LGBTQ discrimination; (4) Effects of a hostile school climate on educational outcomes and…

This is the executive summary for the report, "The 2021 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of LGBTQ+ Youth in Our Nation's Schools." The full GLSEN 2021 National School Climate Survey report includes information on LGBTQ middle and high school students' experiences, including: (1) Hearing biased language, from both students…

The language teens use in digital spaces--from social network posts to instant message chats to text messages--often does not adhere to Standard Written English (SWE). Their digital writing involves a combination of written and conversational languages and often has a digital thumbprint that distinguishes the writer. As a means to understand this…

The aim of the study was to demonstrate the style of text language used by Finnish pre-teen texters (n = 65) and determine how their text language related to their traditional literacy skills, and compare descriptively these results with earlier results from work with young English texters. Three kinds of text messages (natural texts, elicited…

This paper draws on data gathered from a five-month phenomenological study of middle school students' perceptions of the effects of computer-based technologies on a learning community in an online synchronous environment. Twenty-four eighth-grade students participated in the Web Pen Pals project, a university-secondary telecollaborative…