Huy Phung

A fascinating plenary talk on perception-production link by Prof. Chang at the 5th international conference on heritage/community languages at UCLA @cbchang.bsky.social

with a lengthy blog post for my future self phunghuy.net/2025-year-in...

I decided to review and reflect on my 2025, not by drafting and GenAI-polishing a long passage, but crafting an infographic. Designing it allowed me to think and reflect while doing. Design to me is a kind of thinking in doing, thinking in action. Design IS thinking, not just a modifier of thinking.

Here are the chapters and their authors on validity from each edition:

- EM1 - 1951 by Edward E Cureton (74 pages)
- EM2 - 1971 by Lee J Cronbach (65 pages)
- EM3 - 1989 by Samuel Messick (92 pages)
- EM4 - 2006 by Michael T. Kane (48 pages)
- EM5 - 2025 by Suzanne Lane & Scott F. Marion (85 pages)

One of my favorite chapters in EM is the one on Validity and Validation, which is usually longer than others because it’s so important to measurement.

The 5th edition of Educational Measurement (EM) is now available, and it’s OPEN ACCESS.

fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

LLM use in scholarly writing poses a provenance problem Nature Machine Intelligence - LLM use in scholarly writing poses a provenance problem

It’s good to see papers start to address LLMs as structural plagiarism — provenance, more hidden than the original words or training data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

Suneung agency chief resigns over too-difficult English exam The chief official in charge of the administration of the country's annual national college entrance exam stepped down Wednesday to take responsibility for the

The head of the Korean agency that develops the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT or 수능), a national college entrance exam, resigned due to the recent English language section being too difficult.

www.koreaherald.com/article/1063...

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

New, OPEN ACCESS, Cambridge Elements in Language Teaching series... Please download your free copy today! doi.org/10.1017/9781...

"Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)"

by Yolanda Ruiz de Zarobe (University of the Basque Country)

The recording is now available so that you can confirm that I indeed have a German accent and color-match my outfits with my Zoom background.

youtu.be/YL0co26ng-g?...

AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea South Korea’s AI learning program was rolled back after just four months following a backlash from teachers, students, and parents, underlining the challenges in embedding the technology in education.

Just throwing AI at education doesn't seem to work. "<thing>, but with AI" is in policy and attracting investments everywhere these days. I hope other countries can learn from Korea's unfortunate experience.

restofworld.org/2025/south-k...

Causal inference interest group, supported by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies Seminar series 20th October 2025, 3pm BST (UTC+1) "Making rigorous causal inference more mainstream" Julia Rohrer, Leipzig University Sign up to attend at tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRohrer

Happy to announce that I'll give a talk on how we can make rigorous causal inference more mainstream 📈

You can sign up for the Zoom link here: tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRo...

Reading Circle = Literature x TBLT

Looks like my favorite paper on the age trajectory of happiness is finally out!!! So happy for the authors. Go check it out, it’s great.

Assistant Professor (Second Language Corpus Linguistics) Title: Assistant Professor (Second Language Corpus Linguistics)Hiring Unit: College of Arts, Languages & Letters/Department of Second Language StudiesLocation: University of Hawaii at ManoaDate Posted...

*please share widely*

My department (Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) is hiring a corpus linguist who conducts research on second languages. Great place to teach (2/2 load) and do research! See link for more details:

go.hawaii.edu/mGc

Why science needs outsiders - Works in Progress Magazine Science has forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who are able to take a fresh perspective.

Fun article about “outsider” scientists and their breakthroughs.

“Academia filters most funding, publishing, and hiring decisions through senior insiders, which favors ideas within existing paradigms.”

worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...

A reminder that abstracts for the hybrid symposium on the quantitative/qualitative divide in applied linguistics are due August 30. corpus.cal.msu.edu/1052-2/

An arrow with a LaTeX equation

Trigonometric functions and a unit circle

A bivariate change model with structured residuals

A hierarchical model of cognitive abilities

Now on CRAN, ggdiagram is a #ggplot2 extension that draws diagrams programmatically in #Rstats. Allows for precise control in how objects, labels, and equations are placed in relation to each other.
wjschne.github.io/ggdiagram/ar...

World Englishes, heterodoxy, and applied linguistics It is understandable that many people find it challenging to adopt a positive moral position with regard to English and its role in the world. The language is used in many contexts and situations to ...

I'm enjoying this new article by Christopher Jenks that highlights some positives of English as a global language.

One neat thread Jenks discusses is the role of English in the spread of the Korean Wave. I'd add that Korean-American KOR/ENG bilinguals have played a huge role in K-pop's spread

New paper: Comparing #lab-based and #remote data collection methods in second #language acquisition research. A close #replication study (McManus et al., in Research Methods in Applied #Linguistics) authors.elsevier.com/a/1lYuB9sT3h... #langsky #lingsky #researchmethods #online

Please consider submitting a proposal to our hybrid symposium in October on the quant/qual divide in applied linguistics.
corpus.cal.msu.edu/1052-2/

A Text-Driven TBLT Approach to Materials Development go.viettblt.com/hitomi

The washback effect: How tests shape the way we study English New research explores what test prep looks like around the world—and how thoughtful test design can support meaningful learning.

Over the last year, I've been investigating Duolingo English Test preparation and washback with a multilingual team of researchers at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. This guest blog post on DET's Test Center blog shares some of our findings and general advice for test takers.

This workshop series explores the intersection of theory and practice in Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), with a special focus on materials development as a space for productive and meaningful knowledge exchange.

A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Home Use RMarkdown to generate PDF Conference Posters via HTML - brentthorne/posterdown

"Of course there's an R package to make academic posters in Markdown". *chuckles, shakes head* #rstats github.com/brentthorne/...

Jasp textbook site is now live: discoverjasp.com. @sagepub.com