The Washington State University Cougar Marching Band freakin' played Trogdor at their halftime show this weekend! And made ME! My husky head finally gets its due! 50 freakin' yards high man!

Y’all these genzplyr PRs are off the hook: github.com/hadley/genzp...

MwALT (Midwest Association of Language Testers) 2025 conference wrapped up today! Great sessions and great to catch up with colleagues in the Midwest (and quite nostalgic, as this was a conference I attended frequently in grad school).

@langtestjournal.bsky.social has made our article "A survey of English language proficiency tests in international student admissions at US research-intensive universities" free to read/download for 1 year! Mahalo!

ls.berkeley.edu/news/memoria... 😭

A press release about our new measure of print concepts knowledge
innovationcenter.msu.edu/msu-boosting...

A paper on the 2-part writing assessment task I helped develop is out in @langtestjournal.bsky.social! You can also read about it at blog.englishtest.duolingo.com/new-research.... We detect themes in what test takers wrote in composition 1 to choose the prompt they write about for composition 2.

New study with Maggie McGehee (recent SLS MA grad) on English proficiency test scores (Duolingo, IELTS, TOEFL) and int'l student academic outcomes at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

We considered first-year GPA and adverse academic outcomes (probation, drop-out) among grad and undergrads.

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

I loved finding out about English As She Is Spoke... an English phrasebook written by an author who didn't know English so used a Portuguese-French and then a French-English phrasebook. I cried with laughter 🤣

Hyping my colleagues' work too!

scholar.google.com/citations?vi... speaking of mobile access 🤦‍♀️, it's supposed to be open access, but equinoxpub is giving me a logon page, so here's the Google Scholar link

Now that more folks are on BSky I'll try to remember to post! Our paper in CALICO Journal surveyed English language needs. Technology comfort is high, but instructors report using more devices than students, which has implications for tech access/preferences when designing curricula/assessments.

PSA: starter packs are capped at 150 people, so we're following back everyone we find who has linguist (or a subfield/interdisciplinary field thereof) in their bio to try to help create a longer list so people can find each other!

So far over 600, yay!

If we've missed you let us know!
#linguistics

I've created an Applied Linguistics and Second Language Studies starter pack for new BlueSky users (I credit @danielrisbell.bsky.social for the idea). Please share and let me know if you'd like to be added to or removed from the list!

go.bsky.app/VZPgwMD

Updated ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines just dropped.

ctrl-f "native" - word not found :)

#Langsky

www.actfl.org/news/revised...

@adrea.bsky.social would your colleagues or students know about this age group? Tysm Dan!

Does anyone know the research on how much English to use initially for 3- to 8-year-olds in a Japanese class in the US? My colleague is going to teach Japanese and trying to decide how much EN to use in the beginning. This group is starting from 0 Japanese. @danielrisbell.bsky.social ?

My work with Duolingo colleagues is on pp. 30-33 of the 8th ALTE proceedings. We used multilingual BERT (machine-learning transformer models) to predict word, sentence, and passage difficulty for French and Spanish prototype tests of reading and listening proficiency: c-test, dictation, vocabulary.