Dan Isbell
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danielrisbell.bsky.social
Dan Isbell
@danielrisbell.bsky.social
910 followers 590 following 1.3K posts
Associate Professor of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, specializing in language assessment. Associate Editor at Language Learning journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679922). Views own. https://isbell.github.io/
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danielrisbell.bsky.social
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.
January 16, 2026 at 9:35 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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.
January 16, 2026 at 1:35 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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?
January 6, 2026 at 7:09 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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.
January 5, 2026 at 8:09 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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.
November 25, 2025 at 9:35 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Regretting the Japanese class for my 2nd grader:
November 15, 2025 at 5:50 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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!
November 14, 2025 at 9:26 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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
November 14, 2025 at 9:26 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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.
October 30, 2025 at 6:34 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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?
October 15, 2025 at 11:40 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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.
October 15, 2025 at 11:40 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
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/
September 7, 2025 at 4:26 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
I haven't and won't read the book, but like... What is this? Not the #1 threat but critical to vaguely discuss "a social norm that kicks in" on campuses while politicians who ban books, words, etc are spared from being named.
August 31, 2025 at 7:48 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Ian Bogost's piece on AI is sobering and worth a read, though entirely too sympathetic to AI users and too cynical regarding the entire project of universities.

To pick a specific nit: Lectures might remain unchanged for decades because the fundamental knowledge students need to know (and be /n
Like the other members of his class, Lieber did experience a bit of college life before ChatGPT appeared. Even then, he said, at the very start of his freshman year, he felt alienated from some of his introductory classes. “I would think to myself, What the hell am I doing, sitting watching this professor give the same lecture that he has given every year for the last 30 years?” But he knew the answer even then: He was there to subsidize that professor’s research. At America’s research universities, teaching is a secondary job activity, at times neglected by faculty who want to devote as much time as possible to writing grants, running labs, and publishing academic papers. The classroom experience was suffering even before AI came onto the scene. But students seem to want a deeper sort of classroom innovation. They’re not looking for gimmicks—such as courses that use AI only to make boring topics seem more current. Students like Lieber, who sees his college education as a means of setting himself up for his career, are demanding something more. Instead of being required to take tests and write in-class essays, they want to do more project-based learning—with assignments that “emulate the real world,” as Lieber put it.
August 19, 2025 at 1:24 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Stefan from SNL
August 8, 2025 at 7:18 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
I'm in Korea with a study abroad program, and I have students take pictures of Korea's #linguisticlandscape focused on language mixing and non-Korean languages.

I also participate and share things I find.

But I don't think I'll share this one with the students...
A sign on a mall storefront that says "Wonder Shoes", but the first S in shoes isn't very recognizable.
July 22, 2025 at 10:26 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Clear skies in Seoul today! View from my home-away-from-home office as I work on a final project report:
View of southeastern Seoul, with Lotte World Tower
July 11, 2025 at 6:48 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Perk of going to Korean education conferences: K-beauty swag!
Picture of a hand and nail cream gift set
July 5, 2025 at 10:42 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Nosek seems to qualify the need for/value of replication studies here: more critical for interventions connected to policy.
June 30, 2025 at 6:47 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
My son and I rode big helium balloon in Suwon and walked a part of the Hwaseong wall. Fun to come back to that part of Suwon after many years!
View looking down from the helium balloon. A boy walking up a path at a Korean fortress.
June 7, 2025 at 11:19 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Test security in the nightly news here in Korea: test items and keys leaked, including English section.
June 5, 2025 at 12:44 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
An especially good Aloha Friday yesterday! Happy to be able to continue being a part of Second Language Studies at UH Mānoa.
SUBJECT: Decision Regarding your Application for Tenure and Promotion I am delighted to inform you that your application for Tenure and Promotion at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa has been approved. These actions are effective August 1, 2025, and your human resources office will process the necessary documents to reflect this action.
May 24, 2025 at 9:33 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Yes, even if their schools are understaffed or teachers poorly trained, children in Arizona will finally be able to get the right information about "Kill the Boers" and the never-written books of famous authors.

www.12news.com/article/news...
May 23, 2025 at 5:34 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Some interesting Korean language testing news: Apparently there is talk of privatizing the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK). Korean language educators and researchers are not happy about this - see screenshot below from the International Association for Korean Language Education website:
May 17, 2025 at 1:35 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Good news, which serves as a good reminder to donate:
donation button on aclu website
May 9, 2025 at 7:05 PM