I try to be optimistic about academia, but then there are evenings like today...

I am reviewing a textbook on GenAI and second language teaching for a renowned commercial publisher. Although I now priorise reviewing for scholar-led, non-commercial publishers, the topic is of personal interest to me and I accepted this invitation because I wanted to ensure that critical AI literacies were well represented in this new textbook (and decent financial compensation was offered, which I admit was also a motivation). This evening, I started reading the preface (which was short but promising) and the introduction. After a couple of pages of pleasant reading, I came across a statement that I thought was odd so I decided to follow up on the reference that was used to support this statement. It turned out that the DOI in the reference section returned a 404. And that the entire reference does not exist! This made me suspicious so I went through all references in Ch. 1 and found three additional hallucinated references and several more incorrect DOIs! I'm not reading any further – will now stop working and attempt to write a polite review tomorrow.

#AppliedLinguistics #SLA #GenAI #academia

Another book review just dropped: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.00069.gra! ☺️ Many thanks to @mariannagracheva.bsky.social for her kind review and especially for highlighting the pedagogical implications of my research on the language of EFL textbooks. I came to doing a #PhD in applied linguistics not as someone who had studied linguistics, but rather as an experienced language teacher and interpreter, so practical implications of linguistics research have always been very important to me.

Book and online supplements: https://elenlefoll.github.io/TextbookMDA/

#linguistics #ELF #AppliedLinguistics #education

A friend was suprised to see "bolt" in the category "eat voraciously" in yesterdays NYT Games' Connections, so I did a little corpus study:

Of 100 randomly selected occurences of "bolt" in COCA, 0 mean 'to eat'

Of the 123 occurrences of "bolted down" in COCA, 4 mean 'to eat' and 1 'to drink'.

So I'm not suprised he was suprised.

#appliedlinguistics #corpuslinguistics #linguistics

My thoughts on "What Makes Academic Writing Human(e): A Critical Realist Response" in: Bouchard & Zotzmann, eds. #CriticalRealism in #AppliedLinguistics #CambridgeUniversityPress 2026

#AcademicWriting
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#WhatMakesAcademicWritingHumane
#GenAI

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/critical-realism-in-applied-linguistics/what-makes-academic-writing-humane/C0B8F2E866A5750FE9B4C19FD04FD78A

June 2nd to 4, 2026, the #WritingResearch community will meet in #Winterthur, #Switzerland, for the #SIGWriting Conference 2026. Hosted at #ZHAW School of #AppliedLinguistics

The website is online

https://www.earli.org/events/sig-writing-conference-2026

The call for proposals is open until *December 17, 2025* 24:00 AOE. It's a firm deadline!

We welcome submission as a paper, symposium, poster or demo, or roundtable. All formats are explained on the website, or just ask me :)

Plz boost!

#SIGWriting2026 #AcademicChatter