Dan Isbell

@danielrisbell

Associate Professor of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, specializing in language assessment. Associate Editor at Language Learning journal ( Views own.

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Bluesky

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Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· 1d

I will give a hint for today's puzzle: Despite what Bsky and other social media experience might suggest, "grass" is not a common collocate of the verb "touch"

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· 4d

How difficult it must have been to take responsibility for unethically taking $6mil... Poor guy will just have to console himself with the $6mil.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· 7d

Wow he is really on this sunscreen thing:

It was obvious to anyone with eyes that I’d been picked because I was one of the handful of Bates faculty members who didn’t need to wear SPF 50 sunscreen.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· 14d

Very glad to see @kmcmanus.bsky.social and Luke Plonsky put AAAL's feet to the fire a bit in their new editorial introducing two new Open Science-inspired article types. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jul 10

One of my better attempts at collocateswordgame.com : verbs that come before the noun "text"

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jul 3

Came up on my photo app memories today from a couple years ago in South Korea... "A special meal for you" is one way to describe what one would think a restaurant called "Roast Child" might serve.

Sign for a restaurant called "Roast Child"

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jun 8

Today's www.collocateswordgame.com word is "conference", which is a neat coincidence after returning from LTRC 2026 in Montreal last night. I did okay on this one - the obvious verb collocates got me 86 points. The rest needed a bit more careful thinking on my part. Give it a shot!

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· May 11

I don't know how this add landed in my Gmail inbox, but it certainly captures a lot of what is wrong with the US. Raise some serious totals at the pump to affirm your masculinity and engage in antisocial driving behavior!

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· May 2

#bluesky won't you go with me? wow!

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Apr 12

Interesting how, despite no large truck interior backdrop and unfashionability of wraparound sunglasses, it's plain as day we have found the British equivalent of this:

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Mar 27

COPS COPS COPS COPS COPS, COPS COPS COPS COPS COPS COPS, COPS

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Mar 18

lol

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Mar 18

Okay I've found a use for Gen AI that's actually entertaining (if not particularly useful):

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Feb 19

What could go wrong?

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Feb 17

Fantastic project, and very cool to see the @universityofhawaii.bsky.social contribution, including Micah Mizukami's, a PhD student in my department who is also AD of the Center for Oral History.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Feb 16

Me watching that last scene:

Meme: Di Caprio spotting something on TV from Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Feb 16

A Hollywood nugget for #languagetesting folks: In the last scene of Triple Frontier, Oscar Isaacs' character blends into a crowd, you can see a banner for an #IELTS test center. I think the shot was somewhere in Colombia (see top right in screenshot).

screenshot of Triple Frontier showing a street scene with an IELTS test center sign.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jan 29

Lukianoff casually crashing the Oscar Meyer weinermobile into the academy...

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jan 16

This part kind of blew me away. Just amazing how some people, who I probably disagree with on most things but are reasonably intelligent, just miss the incredibly obvious subtext and refuse to believe it even when spelled out explicitly right in front of them (as Carvalho did on this call).

In a last-ditch effort of sorts, Rauch, Haidt and Strossen organized a call with Carvalho. The discussion didn’t inspire confidence in the group, said someone with knowledge of the call who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Carvalho basically told them that UATX was a right-wing project, and that they’d known this when they signed up. But that wasn’t what any of them had believed.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jan 16

All the free speech warriors who go apoplectic when a professor comments on race or gender in lecture complete ignore the actual state-enforced censorship of ideas sweeping the country: pen.org/report/americas-censored-campuses-25-web-of-control

Map showing states with laws, executive orders, or proposed bills that limit free speech/intellectual freedom in higher education.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jan 6

But then, right after discussing how difficult it is to publish in top-tier journals now, he laments that *some people* are getting hired too easily:

In stark contrast to the lowering of the boom – and based on my experience both as a reviewer and as a member of promotion committees – one worries there might also be an emerging tendency for some gatekeepers to be laxer in admitting work for publication and candidates for promotion where the decision would have been negative some years ago. One reason might be to ensure that members of perceived intellectually shortchanged groups have their day in the sun. I have witnessed at least one case where a candidate was preferred over another because the former ticked most of the critical minority group criteria. Ironically, the university decided to let the candidate go because their publications were limited and their student teaching evaluations were weak. Who is to say how they would have fared in the current academic climate?

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Jan 5

Nice to be featured in Grixoni et al.'s recap of SLRF 2025 in Language Teaching: doi.org/10.1017/S026...

This breadth of topics was well represented by both senior scholars as well as early career researchers and graduate students in the field, often through collaborative work. HeeJoon Choi, Yingliang Liu, and YouJin Kim, for example, compared the effects of digital multimodal composing (DMC) and traditional monomodal writing on vocabulary learning and reading comprehension in integrated reading-to-write tasks among Chinese EFL learners. The study found that writing modality influenced both vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension, suggesting potential advantages of DMC for integrated literacy development and informing pedagogical approaches to multimodal integration in L2 instruction. Yoonseo Kim and Daniel Isbell likewise exemplify the junior + senior scholar collaborations found at SLRF. Their talk presented an item-level method for scoring graph-description tasks with large language models. Comparing several state-of-the-art LLMs to human raters, they found solid alignment – especially on elementary items – and clear differences in rater severity across models. Overall, the approach shows promise for augmenting human scoring by capturing graph-specific content and delivering targeted, item-level feedback.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Nov 25

The American people do want to hear more about Dershowitz, but not for the reasons Weiss imagines:

Wikipedia screencap that reads: In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the murder trial of O. J. Simpson as part of the legal "Dream Team" alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey.[9] He was a member of Harvey Weinstein's defense team in 2018[6] and of President Donald Trump's defense team in his first impeachment trial in 2020.[5] He was a member of Jeffrey Epstein's defense team and helped to negotiate a 2006 non-prosecution agreement on Epstein's behalf.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Nov 15

Regretting the Japanese class for my 2nd grader:

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Nov 14

The Korean National English Curriculum is not set up to get students to this point. Students get to B1-B2. Here's a short reading passage from a 2nd year HS textbook (last year before cramming for CSAT). Flesch-Kinkade grade level of 7.15, CEFR B1, 16.75 words per sentence, easier vocabulary.

In the school volunteer club today, we made natural soap. We had so much fun making beautifully colored soap with oil, water, and other ingredients. We made yellow soap using lemons and some students used chocolate for brown soap. But what does making soap have to do with volunteering? I learned the answer from my teacher, Ms. Kim.

Washing your hands with soap is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to prevent the spread of diseases. In fact, in West and Central Africa alone, the simple practice of washing hands with soap could save the lives of about half a million children each year. Yet, despite the health benefits, soap is very hard to come by in some regions since a bar of soap could cost more than a day's wages!

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Nov 14

Another year, another story about how difficult Korea's College Scholastic Ability Test (수능, similar to SAT) is. This year, Kant showed up in several places, including the English portion of the exam: www.koreaherald.com/article/1061...

A test question with the following text:

34. Kant was a strong defender of the rule of law as the ultimate guarantee, not only of security and peace, but also of freedom. He believed that human societies were moving towards more rational forms regulated by effective and binding legal frameworks because only such frameworks enabled people to live in harmony, to prosper and to co-operate. However, his belief in inevitable progress was not based on an optimistic or high-minded view of human nature. On the contrary, it comes close to Hobbes's outlook: man's violent and conflict-prone nature makes it necessary to establish and maintain an effective legal framework in order to secure peace. We cannot count on people's benevolence or goodwill, but even 'a nation of devils' can live in harmony in a legal system that binds every citizen equally. Ideally, the law is the embodiment of those political principles that all rational beings would freely choose. If such laws forbid them to do something that they would not rationally choose to do anyway, then the law cannot be ______________________________. [3점]

benevolence: 자비심

① regarded as reasonably confining human liberty ② viewed as a strong defender of the justice system ③ understood as a restraint on their freedom ④ enforced effectively to suppress their evil nature ⑤ accepted within the assumption of ideal legal frameworks

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Oct 30

A neat tidbit in the local sports linguistic landscape... place kicker Kansei Matsuzawa, who is originally from Japan and taught himself how to kick field goals by watching YouTube vids, has his surname written in Japanese kanji on his University of Hawaiʻi jersey.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Oct 15

I tried another animal emoji prompt, and apparently there are people who think the badger emoji is an anteater emoji, which people use generically for animals with long snouts?

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Oct 15

This is great - Gemini (my uni pays for it, might as well use it to show AI failures...) gets it right because it searches the web for recent articles, but then suggests people combine the wave and horse for seahorse, which I have no idea on.

Dan Isbell@danielrisbell· Sep 7

So I rephrased their reasoning in a question to Google Gemini (happens to be what my institution paid to give everyone access to...). Here's what I got: 2/