Happy Christmas from the Yorkshire Wolds. ( photo taken a few weeks ago , see you after the holidays , best wishes James )

Exciting times ahead! After 22 wonderful years in York, I’ll be heading to Oxford in January to take up a Professorship in Applied Linguistics. To say it’s a privilege would be an understatement. Joy and exhilaration mixed with awe and that familiar “what-have-I-just-done?” feeling.

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

For avoidance of confusion, that’s just about all academic staff, excluding Heads of Dept and- of course - Senior Management Team.

💡 Expressions of Interest: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships 2026 Deadline: 30 Nov Submit: Completed EOI form, CV (1 page), and proposal outline (max 2 pages) to: [email protected] Complete the form here 👉 shorturl.at/0O2f4

I wrote this morning to the VC and Deputy VC of Nottingham to urge them to rethink the plans for closing languages. You can too, addresses here. www.savemlcatnotts.org.uk

Lovely day for the York 10 mile run today 🌤️🕶️🏃🏻‍♀️

The outcome of organisational reviews captured:“Everything was over-organised and so failed to work properly. The new bureaucracy, which was supposed to impose order, was still enjoying itself writing memos and making out permits, and everything was delayed” (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday)

stop thinking right now

🎓 13 PhD POSITIONS available across Europe! 🌍 HUM.AI.N-ACCENT is an EU-funded research project that explores the impacts of foreign-accented speech in human-human and human-AI interactions. More info: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... #PhD #MSCA #HorizonEurope #CognitiveScience #AI

Nominate yourself to come run your own research dept in lovely MPI-PL in the woods. Or nominate someone amazing - your colleague, supervisor, former student.... Deadline for nominations 19th December

PhD Position: Accented Speech Processing - Apply now! Come work with Mirjam Broersma, @davidpeeters.bsky.social, and me at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University in the Netherlands. Application deadline: 19 October 2025 For more information, see www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Tansies of York

Posting on behalf of Tamar Gollan, who is not on Bluesky: A postdoc position is open and available immediately in Dr. Tamar Gollan’s Laboratory of Aging Bilingualism at the University of California, San Diego, funded by NIH & NSF. See link for details! psychiatry.ucsd.edu/about/LAB_Go...

** New ** Seeking Postdoctoral Research Fellow (3 yrs) for ESRC project on skilled reading in Arabic. Based in my lab at @rhulpsychology.bsky.social and collaborating with @denisdrieghe.bsky.social (Soton) and Sami Boudelaa (UAE). Please share! jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

...I mean that even with careful prompts I would not be confident LLMs could perform the function I'd want. How do I know that any bland AI summary of a paper is going to extract what might be of value to *me* in it? I don't even know that myself before I read it...

We are worried about our students. There is a misapprehension that behaving "unhappy" gives an impression of worldliness or that it signals empathy to the world’s problems. What is worse- suppressing happiness changes your capacity for joy. www.wsj.com/opinion/how-...

If you haven’t joined the union - time to do it right now! Better and stronger together 👏 #ucu #jointheunion #universityoflincoln

The full program for our hybrid symposium on the quan/qual divide in applied linguistics is now available. October 17 - no fees or preregistration. Luke Plonsky and Bethany Gray are giving keynotes along with nine other talks and a panel discussion. corpus.cal.msu.edu/1052-2/

Call for Papers for EuroSLA 35 Lisbon 24-27 July 2026 www.eurosla.org/call-for-pap...

Deadline Nov 1: Asst prof (tenure track), Syntax and Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Ohio State University osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/OSUCareers/j...

Jobs: Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics: Assistant Professor in Language Science/Linguistics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Haystacks at dawn

I screen out Frontiers emails so hadn't seen a colleague's invite to their editorial board. so the colleague emailed me directly to ask again (we're friendly w/ each other) I don't like saying 'no' to service for good colleagues, but one must act on principle against bad publishers. here's my reply

We need more in-depth reporting on UK university finances like this. Research , research funding and their relation to teaching and teaching funding could do with a similar level of detail. Here's a sharing link for 3 non-subscribers: on.ft.com/3ImSMWa

Announcing the first (and perhaps only) Multilingual Minds and Machines Meeting! Come join us in Nijmegen, June 22-23, 2026, if you are interested in computational models of human multilingualism: mmmm2026.github.io

It's #WorldChildlessWeek Here is a really useful article that discusses this "quieter experience that tends to go unnoticed" and what organisations may consider. #WorldChildlessWeek2025 #Infertility The Invisible Experience: Childlessness in the Workplace www.linkedin.com/pulse/invisi...

Interspecies love at its very best.

Excellent news. I'm just off to the off-license then (Ik ga nu naar de slijterij)... congratulations Matt et al!

@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!

The past tense of ‘to go’ is ‘went’, but this form used to belong to the verb ‘to wend’. We call such verbs suppletive. Surprisingly, ‘to bring’ is suppletive too: ‘brought’ comes from a different verb. My new graphic tells you all about their past. In certain varieties of English, ... 1/

📢📢📢The fifth round of the IRIS Replication Award is now open for submissions and will close at midnight (GMT) on 30th November 2026. ▶️For more information or to submit your application, please follow this link: www.iris-database.org/replication-...

Nottingham colleagues @uonucu.bsky.social and UoN Unison are on strike next week in defence of jobs. Please donate to their hardship fund if you can, and please share the link 👇 #UnionStrong #DefendJobs #DefendHE #WeAreTheUniversity #UCU

Or, just tell the students if they'd like some friendly feedback, to put the bullet points into AI and help themselves to whatever style of feedback they'd prefer! That's no sillier than the suggestion here, and arguably fairer cos it's completely open.

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

'Why does nothing work anymore, and what can we do about it?' Hugely honoured to be giving the Chancellor's Lecture at @yorkstjohn.bsky.social in conversation with University Chancellor, Reeta Chakrabarti. 6pm Weds 15th October - register here www.yorksj.ac.uk/events/upcom...

The Linguistics Department at the University of Florida has an opening for a lecturer in General Linguistics, starting Fall 2026. Come join our team! explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

I am seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the ESRC-funded project 'Writing Tasks at School and University'. The post is full-time and will run from 1st November 2025 to 31st January 2029. See below for a brief overview of the project. jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

Our department is hiring! We're looking for a cognitive/developmental psychologist who uses computational approaches to study human cognition and behavior to address learning, development, and education. Feel free to reach out with questions!

Expose on an alleged IELTS cheating scandal in Bangladesh. Two arrests related to selling exam content from the paper-based version of the test. www.daily-sun.com/post/825063

For decades, linguists assumed kids drive language change through ‘imperfect’ learning. New research by Raviv, Blasi & Kempe (Psychological Review) show that instead, adolescents and young adults are more likely to spread, normalize, and cement linguistic shifts. www.mpi.nl/news/young-c...

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UCDavis Psych is hiring an Assistant Professor in Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠✨ Come join a vibrant, collaborative dept and live in a fun college town near Sacramento, San Francisco, Napa, and Lake Tahoe. Applications due Oct.21. Please share widely! recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300

Deadline 15 Oct: Postdoc, Multilingualism and Language Learning (w/ Ø. Vangsnes, M. Anderssen), Center for Language, Brain and Learning, UiT The Arctic University of Norway www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

New article on English language testing in admissions by @timeshighered.bsky.social. A study I recently published is linked www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/are-st...

Ooh we've opened our call for small research grants. £10k for any humanities or social sciences research. Open to independent scholars. We use partial randomisation to allocate the funding: random allocation between all that meet the quality threshold www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/ba-l...

An opportunity to join an absolutely amazing applied linguistics group at Oxford www.education.ox.ac.uk/vacancy/asso...

August BH 1998 & 2025. Half a lifetime and still dancing like no one’s watching 🕺🏻🪩 #carnival

Two great opportunities with JESLA/EUROSLA