Marcel Van Amelsvoort 🇨🇦

West Japan city to make elementary, junior high school trips free in FY 2026 - The Mainichi NARUTO, Tokushima -- The city of Naruto in west Japan's Tokushima Prefecture will make school trips for municipal elementary and junior high schools f

May include international trips to Korea mainichi.jp/english/arti...

Article from Yomiuri Shimbun. JP headline: https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/20260216-GYT1T00086/

Tsukuba University in Ibaraki Prefecture has apologized after a professor posted to social media that "most foreign students who come to Japan are generally dim-witted troublemakers." The school is "investigating" whether the remarks violated school social media guidelines.

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

Japanese student suicides hit record high in 2025 | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News A Japanese government report shows that the number of suicides by students through high school hit an all-time high last year.

www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/...

Beautiful. Plum blossoms over cherry blossoms. And it's not even close.

New study on cognitive load shows it's not a single, stable thing that students carry through a lesson. It rises, falls, peaks, and interacts with motivation. 1/4

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Explore the most read research in Studies in Second Language Acquisition:
📚 https://cup.org/4qpCw7G

#linguistics

The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) has recently been aligned with CEFR and will begin adding CEFR levels to score reports soon. It looks like JLPT N2 caps out at B2, while high enough scores on N1 can reach C1.

I like that the levels correspond to "Linguistic, Receptive".

#langsky

Figure 2. 2022 international student mobility network.

Navigating global trends: a longitudinal network analysis of international student mobility

Jeanette B. Ruiz, @pablomflores.phd and George A. Barnett

Open access → doi.org/10.1177/1028...

#StudentMobility #InternationalStudents #IntlEd #NetworkAnalysis

A Swimming Memorial Service held in Tokyo's Sumida River on March 10, 1985 in recognition of the 1000s who died when they leapt into the river during the firebombing 40 yrs prior

50 participants swam 500m in the frigid Sumida so as to "feel the coldness of that water firsthand and pray for peace"

Some really interesting reading in this - The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2025 www.edutopia.org/visual-essay... - Though no criteria for choosing these as the top 10.

This new book presents a framework for teaching second language and multilingual writing that integrates Concept-Based Language Instruction and Genre-Based Writing Pedagogy. buff.ly/sGFLgyU

"Canadian Word of the Year" on a red banner. Beneath the banner reads "maplewashing" and "the deceptive practice of making things look more Canadian than they actually are"

And the results are in! After carefully reviewing the results of a national poll the Board of Directors of the Society for Canadian English (SCE) has determined that this year’s Canadian Word of the Year (CWOTY), the first of its kind, will be “maplewashing.”

Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023 - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023

A new study of the last 50 years of US pop music shows “a significant increase in stress-related language, alongside declines in positive sentiment and lyrical complexity.”

This Academic Year the AI Education Landscape Has Shifted… Again! What has September to November 2025 taught us about the future of learning? Since September 2025, the AI landscape in education has transformed at a pace that would make your head spin – it c…

This is a great round up of what’s going on with AI in education across the various platforms

Meet one of the oldest early printed books in our collections - a Japanese-Spanish dictionary compiled by Catholic missionaries and published in 1630 in Manila 📖

Communicative and task-based language teaching: where are we now? Published in The Language Learning Journal (Ahead of Print, 2025)

Open access: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A story in the parts

A story in three parts

reposting with alt text because this feels incredibly significant. the right-wing disinfo machine means a lot of the people grieving Charlie Kirk never heard any of the things he said that would have tarnished his brand as Guy Who Just Wants to Have Dialogue Across the Aisle

Harnessing the spacing effect to creating more efficient gaps Why quiet intervals, sleep and early returns beat cramming in both training and teaching

*NEW* The day I do nothing is the day I get faster. The minute after you teach is when learning happens. Spacing isn’t a strategy; it’s a timetable. Protect the gap: quiet recap, sleep, early return. Cramming isn't rigour; it’s sabotage.

Learner Language, Discourse and Interaction Cambridge Core - Discourse Analysis - Learner Language, Discourse and Interaction

What do you find when you compare how speakers of British English and learners of British English hold conversations? This is exactly what I look at in a few million words of data, with Issy Clarke and Gavin Brookes in a new FREE book out with CUP today! Link here: www.cambridge.org/core/books/l...

US college declines to oppose Trump travel ban after Iranian students’ plea Letter called on University of Texas at Austin to denounce ban on Iranians and take ‘immediate legal action’.

www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/...

Maybe we all should be wearing tin foil hats🤷.

Ultra-processed foods make up over half of Americans’ calories, CDC says Roughly 55 percent of the average daily caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods, which HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to crack down on.

Ultra-processed foods account for roughly 55 percent of the calories Americans consume daily, according to new federal data.

On the relationship between word reading ability and spelling ability - Reading and Writing The goal of the present study was to test theories about the extent to which individual differences in word reading align with those in spelling and the extent to which other cognitive and linguistic ...

"Our results suggest that word reading and spelling are one and the same, almost, but that spoken vocabulary knowledge is more closely related to reading than to spelling." Open article from the great Rebecca Treiman and colleagues. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Introducing 'Instructional Illusions' with @paulkirschner.bsky.social and Jim Heal carlhendrick.substack.com/p/introducin...

Sign up here, to join our (Clare Wright, Leeds and I) talk for the ELINET Online Network seminar series on May 8th (14:00 BST) about international students' experiences of study abroad: uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

International students weigh new risks of pursuing higher education in the US under Trump As colleges and universities respond to Trump administration directives to change how they operate, educators worry that fewer international students will want to study in the U.S..

apnews.com/article/coll... International students weigh new risks of pursuing higher education in the US under Trump