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While research has indicated that college students may benefit from collaboratively reading academic texts, little is known about how they co-construct comprehension through text-based discussions. This case study focused on two groups of undergraduate students with different degrees of participation in discussions -- one active group and one silent group -- in a course on English for academic purposes (EAP) at a Chinese university. Drawing upon classroom observation and semi-structured interviews, the study investigated the spontaneous use of reading strategies in 10 post-reading group discussions and probed into the key processes for comprehension building shared by the two groups. The findings suggest that the students utilized a series of reading strategies and drew on the ideational and linguistic resources shared within the group to build comprehension. Three key processes for comprehension co-construction were found: (1) paraphrasing to contribute personal understanding, (2) elaborating to clarify meanings, and (3) summarizing to build consensus. Pedagogical implications concerning the instruction and task design for collaborative academic reading are discussed.

Differentiated instruction is much demanded yet quite challenging in face of the growing student diversity in today's K-12 classrooms. One major challenge is the provision of differentiated materials to students. Automated text simplification (ATS) tools fueled by natural language processing may serve as a useful assistant for teachers. However, little is known about teachers' contextualized use of ATS over time. This case study traced two teachers' use of ATS systems over a semester. Drawing upon three semi-structured interviews and teacher-generated materials with ATS, we identified an evolving pattern of teachers' engagement with ATS systems, a progression from a blind reliance on the tool to a more critical and coordinated use of the tool over time. We further revealed that teachers' evolving understanding of DI, positioning of the role of ATS systems and human instructors, and interpretation of DI need in specific teaching situations interplayed to shape their particular ways of engagement. Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of teachers' contextualized use of ATS technology for DI. By revealing the influencing factors, the findings hold significant pedagogical implications to inform the design of ATS tools and the creation of favorable conditions to maximize the potential of ATS tools for DI and language teaching and learning in general.

This study investigated how different dimensions of digital literacy (DL) competence were related to digital literacy practices in teaching and teacher identity. Survey data were collected from 910 pre-service teachers in China. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was conducted to analyse the data. Findings indicated that among the five dimensions of DL competence, three were significant positive predictors of digital practices in teaching, including information and information literacy, communication and collaboration, and security. In addition, digital literacy practices significantly and positively predicted teacher identity and mediated the effect of DL competence on teacher identity. The study suggests the significance of enhancing DL competence and integrating digital technology as pedagogical tools to help pre-service teachers bridge the gap between their personal use of technology and teacher identity in relation to digital literacy.

The interaction between water and graphene is important for understanding the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of water on hydrophobic surfaces. In this study, we constructed a high-dimensional potential energy surface (PES) for the water-graphene system using the many-body expansion scheme and neural network fitting. By analyzing the landscape of the PES, we found that the water molecule exhibits a weak physisorption behavior with a binding energy of about − 1000 cm−1 and a very low diffusion barrier. Furthermore, extensive molecular dynamics were performed to investigate the adsorption and diffusion dynamics of a single water on a graphene surface at temperatures ranging from 50 to 300 K. Potential-of-mean-forces were computed from the trajectories, providing a comprehensive and accurate description of the water-graphene interaction kinetics.