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…

In the present study, we first examined the formality and use of academic language in students' scientific explanations in the form of written claim, written evidence, and written reasoning (CER). Middle school students constructed explanations within an intelligent tutoring system after completing a virtual science inquiry investigation. Results…

This study is part of a larger effort to investigate linguistic features of assessment items that might explain differential performance of English learners on science assessments. An analysis of a large set of multiple-choice items suggested two features that held promise in reducing the performance gap: the presence of contrast words and the…