Brian:

Thank you for articulating what I'm sure many "lurkers" like myself have
been thinking. As a secondary school special educational needs teacher,
educational research is my daily routine. When I spot children in
difficulty, I start with a hypothesis about what the problem might be, run
tests, talk to the child and perhaps the child's parents, consult with
colleagues who teach the child, plan an appropriate intervention such as a
reading programme, evaluate progress, fine-tune my original hypothesis, run
further tests if necessary, implement more focused interventions. It's very
much a process of problem-solving as you suggest.

Language is an extremely important element of the process of consultation
and data collection. I expect the educational psychologist (EP), if
involved, to present me with the results of his tests, to give me his
conclusions about the child's needs and to recommend follow-up
interventions. In his reports, our EP uses plain English which is
intelligible to teachers and parents. He has an awareness of audience and
uses a linguistic register which is authoritative but neither patronises
nor confuses. I once attended a conference where teachers, parents, special
educational needs professionals made up the audience. The main speakers
were educational psychologists, several of whom showed scant regard for
anybody in the audience other than their fellow educational psychologists.
They made no concession to non-psychologists either in terms of the
explanations they gave or the terminology they used. After the talks were
over, I turned to the teacher on my left and asked him what he thought. His
response was that the presenters were such intelligent people that he
hadn't understood a word. I turned to the educational psychologist on my
right and posed the same question. She enthused about the brilliance of the
speakers. I turned to my left and assured my fellow teacher that he had no
need to doubt his intellectual capacity because the presentations appeared
to have been written to curry favour with fellow EPs, not to educate the
audience at large. To the EP on my right I observed that the presenters may
have had brilliant ideas to communicate, but no non-psychologist will ever
know because the presenters' communication skills left so much to be
desired. The EP on my right  made no further attempt to defend her
colleagues.

One of the messages from the current thread mentioned a doctoral supervisor
who contended that PhD theses should be couched in academic terms because
the audience for theses was specialised and academic. I'm sure this is
true. However, I would also argue that the book or article that follows the
acceptance of the thesis - a published work rather than a "publishable"
work - there's a fine distinction - ought to be couched in language that is
intelligible to a much broader, multidisciplinary audience of educated,
intelligent people.

David Wilson