Tazin and Jia discuss crisis communication in a linguistically diverse world and a new book co-edited by Dr. Jia Li and Dr. Jie Zhang called Multilingual Crisis Communication that gives us insights into the lived experiences of linguistic minorities affected during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.

This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

This volume brings together 23 contributors and covers a range contexts in which crisis communication during the COVID19 pandemic has been investigated. Focusing on China owing to a high level of linguistic diversity, this book uses critical sociopolitical approaches, to identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Advance praise for the book

‘Setting a milestone in critical sociolinguistic and applied linguistic studies, this volume offers critical insights into overcoming communication barriers for linguistic minorities during crises, promoting social justice, and enhancing public health responses through inclusive, multimodal, and multilingual strategies. It also serves as testimonies of resilience, courage and kindness during the turbulent time’ (Professor Zhu Hua, Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences and Director of International Centre for Intercultural Studies, UCL, UK)

‘The global pandemic has brought to the fore the key role of multilingual communication in disasters and emergencies. This volume contains cutting edge ethnographic studies that address this seriously from the perspective of Chinese scholars and minoritized populations in China. A decisive contribution to the burgeoning field of multilingualism and critical sociolinguistics in times of crisis.’ (Professor Virginia Zavala, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Perú)

Related content

For related content, visit the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives.

Transcript (coming soon)

(Image credit: RACGP)

The global impact of the coronavirus pandemic has reshaped societies worldwide, altering human interactions and perceptions of the world and brought unprecedented challenges, not only in terms of public health management but also in communication. Australia experienced low infection and mortality rates during the initial eight months of the pandemic compared to other regions. This success in containment has been attributed to rigorous testing, contact tracing, mandatory quarantine measures, and timely shutdowns, along with the advantageous geographical location of the country.

During this period, Australian news outlets played a crucial role in disseminating information and shaping public perceptions of the pandemic. This examination delves into the linguistic evolution of media coverage, shedding light on how risk communication strategies evolved over time. The linguistic choices in media coverage significantly influenced public response and adherence to health directives during the pandemic. The strategic changes in language helped stabilize public sentiment and enhance cooperation with health guidelines.

I conducted a study on Australian news outlets at Monash University during the peak of the pandemic. Utilizing the vital work of Mark Davies’ international corpus (Davies, 2019-), I created my own corpus, focusing on nationally recognized news outlets in Australia, such as The Age, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and Channel 9. This resulted in a comprehensive collection from 18 outlets, comprising 5,969 articles and 961,390 words, covering the period from January to September 2020 (Munn, 2021). Articles from these sources were analyzed, focusing on key words used to frame aspects of the virus. The results of this analysis are detailed in this article.

Novel Coronavirus to COVID-19: the Linguistic Evolution

From ‘Deadly’ to ‘Wuhan’: Negative Connotations and Their Impact

When COVID-19 first became acknowledged by Australian news outlets in early January there was a noticeable use of the adjectives ‘deadly’ and ‘mysterious.’ While ‘deadly’ was quite apt in hindsight the use of negative adjectives is something the World Health Organization (WHO) heavily discourages as it can amplify undue fear in the wider public (2015). The changing and evolving information about the virus lead to a familiar pattern of different media sources reporting different and sometimes inflammatory perspectives that happened during the SARS and H1N1 outbreaks (Berry et al., 2007).

‘Wuhan’, the second-most occurring modifier, continues to exhibit a pattern of negative influence. Labelling the virus as the ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ not only implicates a specific geographical region but also inadvertently fosters discrimination against the Chinese community, contributing to a surge in racist incidents globally (Human Rights Watch, 2020).

Drawing from the research of Tang and Rundblad (2015) and WHO (2015), which emphasizes the significance of linguistic framing in risk communication, it becomes apparent that the language used in media reporting can influence public perceptions and behaviours. This observation underscores the importance of employing responsible language to mitigate fear and prevent stigmatization.

Standardization of Terms: The Introduction of ‘COVID-19’

In reaction to the growing negative connotations a new name was introduced by WHO in February 2020. COVID-19 (Corona VIrus Disease 2019) marked a pivotal moment in the risk communication of the virus. The new name was created using the guidelines presented in WHO’s “Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Disease” (2015).

This standardized nomenclature aimed to alleviate the negative connotations associated with ‘coronavirus’, thus promoting a more objective understanding of the disease and the data shows they were successful as ‘COVID-19’ showed no notable examples of the negative modifiers used with coronavirus.

The presence of the two names for the singular virus led to a spike of instances of ‘coronavirus COVID-19’ and ‘COVID-19 coronavirus’ the instances of both names used as modifiers for the other peaks in March after the introduction of ‘COVID-19’ in February. Over half of the instances of these occurrences were in the single month of March. There is a clear sense of interchangeability between the two terms that the Australian media grasped and communications to the wider public that ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ where the same thing, facilitating its widespread adoption.

By June, ‘COVID-19’ emerged as the preferred term, eclipsing ‘coronavirus’ in media discourse. This shift reflects a conscious effort to streamline communication and ensure consistency in messaging. This was not only the case in Australia, but Oxford English Dictionary also report the same result in their worldwide examination of words use relating to COVID-19 (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020).

Crisis Communication Narratives

Linguistic Framing: Proactive vs. Reactive

As the pandemic unfolded, media coverage shifted from solely focusing on the virus to addressing its broader societal impacts. The term ‘COVID-19’ was associated with proactive actions like understanding the cause, prevention efforts, and managing the ongoing challenges (cause, prevention, handling, etc.). In contrast, ‘coronavirus’ narratives often emphasized containment measures, warnings, and identifying hotspots (stop, warn, strain, epicentre, origin, etc.). These differing narratives reflected the multifaceted nature of the pandemic response, highlighting both proactive and reactive approaches to managing the crisis.

Handling Death

The differences in language usage between ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ regarding reporting on deaths attributed to the virus reveal contrasting narratives in media coverage. While ‘coronavirus’ often precedes mentions of ‘new cases’ and ‘more deaths’, emphasizing the novelty and severity of the virus. ‘COVID-19 ‘conveyed a sense of familiarity and normalization, omitting the need for such qualifiers. This distinction suggests that media outlets may unintentionally amplify fear and uncertainty when using ‘coronavirus’, while portraying ‘COVID-19’ as a manageable entity. Understanding these linguistic nuances is crucial for crafting effective risk communication strategies that promote informed decision-making and resilience among the public in navigating the ongoing challenges posed by the pandemic.

‘Fight’ against coronavirus vs ‘Battle’ against COVID-19

There were distinct linguistic nuances were observed in the portrayal of efforts to combat the virus. While both ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ were employed, ‘battle’ was exclusively associated with ‘COVID-19’, suggesting a more protracted struggle with no definitive endpoint in sight. The media viewed ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’ as a fight, while only ‘COVID-19’ was a battle. Fighting coronavirus suggests a victory is possible, but the battle against COVID-19 has no clear victory in mind but just to struggle against the virus.

Linguistic Framing of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs)

Testing

The testing regime for COVID-19 emerged as a crucial strategy employed by the Australian government to curb the spread of the virus. Throughout the analyzed period, there was a discernible uptick in mentions of testing within the corpus, reflecting its increasing importance in public health discourse. Notably, spikes in discussions around testing coincided with the onset of the first and second waves of infections in Australia, underscoring its pivotal role in outbreak management.

While ‘positive tests’ remained consistently prominent, there was a notable anomaly in June, just preceding the second wave, where the frequency of ‘negative tests’ momentarily surpassed that of ‘positive tests.’ This anomaly highlights the dynamic nature of testing trends and suggests potential shifts in public health priorities or testing strategies during specific phases of the pandemic.

Lockdowns

The implementation of restrictions on the Australian public emerged as a crucial measure in controlling the spread of the virus, serving as the second major factor in virus containment. However, the timing and intensity of these restrictions displayed unexpected patterns, both preceding and following the two significant waves of COVID-19 cases in Australia, with ‘lockdown’ being most prevalent during infection peaks. During periods of easing restrictions, language referring to these measures became vaguer, reflecting a gradual relaxation of stringent policies, while during phases of enforcing restrictions, more specific terminology like ‘lockdown’ was employed, indicating a heightened urgency in response to escalating transmission rates.

Conclusion

The linguistic choices made by the Australian media in their coverage of COVID-19 significantly shaped public perceptions and actions in response to the pandemic. By moving from initial, fear-inducing language to more neutral and consistent terminology like ‘COVID-19,’ the media played a pivotal role in stabilizing public sentiment and enhancing adherence to health directives. This strategic linguistic transition underscores the profound impact of media language on public behavior during a health crisis. This observation sets the stage for further research and development of effective communication strategies. By optimizing the linguistic approach in media communication, the aim is to enhance public understanding and cooperation in emergency responses, ensuring that the gap between expert recommendations and public behavior is effectively bridged.

References

Anastasia Tsirtsakis. (2020, July 10). Australia’s COVID-19 response may have saved more than 16,000 lives. https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/australia-s-covid-19-response-may-have-saved-more

Berry, T. R., Wharf-Higgins, J., & Naylor, P. J. (2007). SARS Wars: An Examination of the Quantity and Construction of Health Information in the News Media. Health Communication, 21(1), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410230701283322

Davies, M. (2019-). The Coronavirus Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/

Gabriella Rundblad, & Chris Tang. (2015). When Safe Means ‘Dangerous’: A Corpus Investigation of Risk Communication in the Media. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 666–687. https://academic.oup.com/applij/article-abstract/38/5/666/2952207?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Human Rights Watch. (2020, May 12). Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide | Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide

Munn, C. (2021). What’s In a Name: A Corpus Analysis of Australian Media’s Naming Conventions and Risk Communication During the Coronavirus Pandemic [Masters]. Monash University.

Oxford English Dictionary. (2020, July 15). Using Corpora to Track the Language of Covid-19. Https://Public.Oed.Com/Blog/Using-Corpora-To-Track-The-Language-Of-Covid-19-Update-2/

Stanaway, F., Irwig, L. M., Teixeira‐Pinto, A., & Bell, K. J. (2021). COVID‐19: estimated number of deaths if Australia had experienced a similar outbreak to England and Wales. Medical Journal of Australia, 214(2), 95. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50909

World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), & Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). (2015). World Health Organization best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases (World Health Organization, Ed.). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-HSE-FOS-15.1

Brynn and Michael speak in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. The paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea, in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive signage while other signage remains monolingual.

Some papers and posts that are referenced in this episode include Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape of South Korea, Toiletology and the study of language ideologies, so if you liked this episode be sure to check those out!

Enjoy the show!

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Transcript (added 30/04/2024)

(Image credit: Dr Michael Chesnut)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Michael Chesnut. Michael is a Professor in the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. His work includes researching second language writing, TESOL teacher development, curriculum theory, linguistic landscape research, and translingual academic publishing practices.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sunwgoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape.

Michael, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Chesnut: I’m so happy to be here and thank you for having me on today. It’s so exciting to get a chance to actually talk about a paper. This is such a rare opportunity. I’m just delighted to be here and share my thoughts.

Brynn: Wonderful! To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to living and working in Korea?

Dr Chesnut: Sure! Well, I’ll start with the last question there. About 20 years ago, as a young person having graduated university and not too sure what I was going to do for a career or with the rest of my life, I decided to go abroad. I wanted to get out of Canada where I’m from. At the time, a lot of young people in Canada, especially new university graduates, were going to Korea for a year to teach English, come back with a little bit of money, pay off student loans and then carrying on with the rest of their lives.

So basically, I did that, and I had no interest in Korea. I had done a little bit of teaching and I liked it, so I also thought it would be a good opportunity to play with teaching and get some more experience. I applied all over the world, but I applied a lot in Korea because that’s where a lot of people were going. I didn’t get many job offers because I wasn’t particularly qualified, and then I got one offer in a small town in Korea. A few weeks later I got an offer from Siberia in Russia, but they were too late. So off to Korea I went, and it was interesting. It was really interesting to be in a new country, be immersed in a new language, have no idea what was going on. Teaching was quite interesting and challenging, and I really enjoyed that first year so I stayed in that same small town for a second year. After two years I was starting to get more interested in teaching and wanted to become better at what I was doing. I wanted to remain in Korea and better understand the world I found myself in.

So, I was very lucky and I found a position at a small university, and what was so wonderful was they had an MA TESOL program. So, I could teach there, doing all sorts of different classes, and pursue an MA in TESOL to actually learn better how to teach English. And what was really remarkable was that this particular program had a focus on critical pedagogy. Teaching not just as a replication of existing knowledge, not just sort of helping you know more so you could do a job, but teaching as a means to kind of give more power to students, let them make more informed choices, help them better understand why we’re learning something in particular, why we don’t look at certain other issues. And so that was a really wonderful two years. I enjoyed it. I did a small thesis on language learner identity, and I was really interested in continuing this journey, and that program was founded, or at least developed heavily, by a professor who had studied at Penn State. So really, through him, I had an opportunity to apply to Penn State in their College of Education doing a PhD in curriculum and instruction. The professors there mentored him, and some of the professors that he had mentored had come back to Korea too, so I was able to pursue further education through a PhD at Penn State. I went there and took a lot of classes in the Applied Linguistics Department, really found a second home there alongside curriculum and instruction in the College of Education. My goal was to always come back to Korea as quick as possible to do fieldwork.

So, my PhD dissertation was on foreign language teacher identity. The Americans, Canadians and others who come to Korea and teach English. It’s still a major area of research for me, and so all of that let me to come to Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in my department here, the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication, which is essentially an English interpretation and translation department going English and Korean. Here, I teach English and I do research as part of the university’s responsibilities as well, and so that’s my journey to being here now where I teach a lot of different classes. Some are language classes, some are world Englishes or digital media classes, all with this language focus. And I do research on different issues as well. So that’s kind of my story and who I am as a teacher and a researcher. So again, thanks so much for having me on to talk about all of this. It really is such a privilege to get a chance to talk about a paper. I’m so happy to be here!

Brynn: Oh, that’s excellent, I’m so glad. I’m so glad to be talking to you too, and that’s really interesting to think how differently your life might have gone if Siberia had answered just a couple weeks earlier and not been late.

Dr Chesnut: Oh absolutely, if it had just been slightly reversed – off to northern Russia in the early 2000s.

Brynn: A little colder.

Dr Chesnut: A little colder, different environment. Who knows how life could have turned out then, you know?

Brynn: Yeah, so let’s talk a bit about your work. Quite a bit of your work has to do with something called the linguistic landscape. Not everyone listening to us right now is a linguist, so can you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so even if you’re not a linguist or don’t have a particular interest in language, you encounter the linguistic landscape all the time. The linguistic landscape is essentially all the publicly displayed language or text you see around you. So, walking down the street you see street signs, shop fronts, billboards, movie posters – all of that is the linguistic landscape. All the different text and language you see around you. And that includes graffiti, those stickers you see stuck on telephone poles, or maybe on a utility panel on a back alley. It’s menus posted on restaurant walls.

But when people talk about the linguistic landscape there’s often a real emphasis on multilingualism, on things that have more than one language. There are actually many different researchers who look at movie posters or different types of signs. People who study marketing, for example. But people who talk about the linguistic landscape are usually talking about text with more than one language. That’s where a lot of the focus, not all, but a lot of the focus is.

So, one reason to study this is just the general benefit of understanding something better. These signs are important. They’re an important means of communication, so it’s better to have a deeper understanding of how this communication works. Over the years I’ve heard some people, some linguists, say, “This is actually not real research. This is a hobby. This is someone going on holiday, taking a bunch of photographs, enjoying themselves, coming back and sharing these pictures.” But I’d push back on that and say there’s actually a lot of important communication occurring through multilingual signs. An emergency exit sign in multiple languages can be very important. Looking at movie posters and how they use different scripts or different fonts to mimic other languages or play with what they’re writing – that’s an interesting linguistic phenomenon. So, I think it’s worthwhile. And society does value better understanding this communication.

So that’s one general reason, but there’s a lot of specific reasons to examine the language on signs. Some involve determining the vitality or strength of a language in a particular place. So, walking down the street in a French speaking community in Canada – are there a lot of signs in French? That’s a quick and rough way to determine how strong a language is in a place, although there are very serious limits to examining language in that way because often language doesn’t come into signs. There can be a language spoken in a region, but for various reasons it doesn’t appear on signs. Likewise, there can be a place where a language is no longer spoken very much but it often appears on signs. So, people examine that.

People examine issues of language ideology, or the assumptions we make about language, the values we give to language. And then ask how those values and assumptions shape the language on signs. Maybe there are different varieties of a language, but only one appears on signs. So, then we can go in and look at how these assumptions and values are shaping the use of language on signs.

There are studies involving English as a lingua franca, where English sort of has this role as a general and shared means of communication among people who don’t speak English as a first language where the rules of English are determined by what is effective communication, rather than a standard that comes from the United States or the UK – so how does English work in a tourist destination where people are visiting from all over the world? People examine context like that.

There are a lot of different studies out there. English is a major topic in linguistic landscape research. Some people examine how English can be a symbol of cosmopolitanism, sophistication, style and a means of attracting consumers. People examine skinscapes, so multilingual tattoos and everything that happens when people get a tattoo that involves different languages or multiple languages. How languages are involved in the construction of public space. There’s been some great research on Israel and the use of Hebrew, Arabic and English to construct a particular place through those signs.

Studies on commodification – we can examine Little Italy or Chinatown and look at how language is deployed there, not necessarily reflecting how people speak in that place anymore, but as a means of commodifying and selling that place.

There are studies on how problems are addressed, maybe littering, garbage, public intoxication through multiple languages on signs addressing those problems.

There are questions about signs that come from authorities that seem to go down to the people – top-down signs – and the languages used in those signs, and languages that come from regular people. Signs posted by people about problems in their neighbourhood or a lost dog, and the languages used on those signs, and maybe the differences between those top-down/bottom-up signs.

There are studies on how the linguistic landscape can be used in teaching, and I’ve investigated this and used this in a lot of my classes. We can take pictures of signs into classrooms, into educational contexts, and use that to help people develop their language skills.

But ultimately, we’re looking at a lot of issues of what languages are present on signs. How are those languages being used? What shapes the presence and absence of different languages on signs? What larger issues in society impact and are impacted by the use of language on signs? Even now, maybe how the use of language on signs can challenge existing assumptions in society regarding language and more.

There are some really exciting developments occurring in different places in the world. There are some massive indigenous construction developments, housing developments in Canada. I’ve seen some pictures of those developments where they are using the language of that community on those signs. That’s really interesting. I’d love to read more about that.

Brynn: That sounds fascinating, and also excuse me now while I go google “linguistic skinscapes”. That sounds so cool! I’ve never heard of that as an area of study before. That’s awesome!

Dr Chesnut: It’s really fascinating. It’s not my area. I did a little research because I encountered one paper years ago, and then I did some more research and there have been some interesting developments in that area. So, there are people doing all sorts of interesting research in different areas, very exciting developments. And some of it is, I think, quite important. It could contribute to creating more productive communication in different ways.

Brynn:  I agree, and that’s a great explanation. And I think that in your explanation, you’re doing a great job of pushing back against those people who would say that this is maybe just a hobby or something just a tourist would do. And you’re right, it’s a really important part of the world that we all live in. So, on that, let’s talk about your 2022 paper From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. In the paper, you develop the concept of “multilingual commanding urgency”. What does “multilingual commanding urgency” mean, and how might it appear in the linguistic landscape?

Dr Chesnut: Sure. Well, why don’t I take us through a little example, something that occurred to me, and then we can explore it together and think about how multilingual commanding urgency kind of helps us understand what’s happening around us with some of the signs we see.

So, we can imagine that we’re at a ski resort in north America, and walking through this ski resort we see lots of different signs. A big welcome sign in English. Maybe a giant sign with the name of the place positioned so we can all take photographs with it, post them on Instagram. And lots of signs that are important – rest area here, ski hills that way. Maybe a sign, all in English, that says, “Only qualified skiers should go down these particular hills” – kind of a warning and informational sign to direct people how they should go depending on their level of skill.

As we walk around this ski resort, we see something different. We see a sign that says, “Do not feed the wildlife,” but this sign is also in Korean and Chinese. Looking around, we see that is the only sign that is in English, Korean and Chinese. So, we might start to wonder, “Why is this sign and this sign alone the only sign that is trilingual, incorporating Korean and Chinese, while all these other signs, some quite important, feature only English?” And multilingual commanding urgency is our attempt to conceptualise an answer to that question.

What we argue is that, often in the world, sign makers will, rightly or wrongly, have an idea about who is likely to violate the regulation posted on a sign. There are certain language communities believed to be potential violators of these particular regulations. And there’s a belief that, if this regulation is posted in the language of that community, it will reduce the enforcement burden of those authorities. And when those two conditions are met, there seems to be a greater urgency or effort or impetus to make that sign multilingual.

So, I would explain this imagined “Do not feed wildlife” sign as occurring because some sign maker, some authority within this resort, for some reason believes Korean-speaking guests and Chinese-speaking guests may be more likely to violate this regulation, and that if they post this message in those languages, it will resolve the situation, reduce the enforcement burden of the authorities.

Now that may be completely incorrect, but that may be the authorities’ belief. And this is an imagined scenario, but it is based on something I actually saw in North America at one point.

And we can see this in other places too. You can imagine walking through an airport, maybe an airport in Germany, and this one did happen to me very recently, and see many signs in German and English – “baggage claim area”, “gates 1-10” – all these different signs in English and German. But then you see a door, and it’s an emergency exit and it’s alarmed. If a member of the public opens the door, the alarm goes off, authorities have to rush in, people have to investigate and a lot of things occur. And that door sign has a warning, but not just in German and English, but also Arabic, Russian and Chinese. And this I saw in an airport in Germany. So, that would be explained, I believe, likely by this multilingual commanding urgency. Authorities have identified certain communities as likely to violate this regulation. They believe that if they put the sign in those languages, it will reduce their enforcement burden. The fewer times they have to rush to that emergency door, the better for them. And this creates an urgency, an impetus, to make signs multilingual.

So that’s multilingual commanding urgency. That’s what we conceptualised as the genesis of multilingualism in many of these signs. And there are a lot of examples in literature that don’t talk about multilingual commanding urgency that come from earlier studies but that were foundational. Examples of a “do not spit” sign in an airport in New Zealand – that sign was only in Chinese and Korean, not in English, and actually seemed to create a bit of a furor on social media. Signs in Hong Kong which include Tagalog prohibiting hawking. Signs in Hungarian in Toronto, Canada about a code of conduct requiring some behaviour for young people. So, we do see across literature lots of examples of this. So, this paper and this concept of multilingual commanding urgency are our attempt to explain and discuss this sort of pretty broad phenomena. Does that provide an explanation of this phenomenon?

Brynn: That’s a great answer, and it also makes me think of another space where I’ve seen these types of signs before here in Australia, and that’s in public restrooms. Public toilets. I do believe I’ve seen papers before and even on our research blog, the Language on the Move research blog, we’ve featured these stories before, where on the backs of the stalls, at least in the women’s toilets, there will be these signs about toilet etiquette, and it will only be in certain languages. So again, to your point, of these potential violators of these rules being identified, rightly or wrongly, by the higher up authorities, and then that being targeted through these specific languages.

And your paper looks at cases of multilingual commanding urgency in Seoul, Korea, and specifically two types of directive signs that you and your colleagues found during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19-related “masks required” signs in subway stations, and second, signs prohibiting illegal garbage disposal in side streets. These might sound like totally unrelated signs at first, but your paper found a fascinating connection between them. Can you tell us what you discovered about which languages were used for these different types of signs?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so I’ll start by describing these two signs in detail a little bit. The first set of COVID-19 “masks required” signs were posted because, prior to their posting, there had been strong encouragement to wear masks on subways and public transportation, but as the pandemic developed, there was a regulation developed that required masks to be worn by everyone in subways and the subway station, on public transportation. So, suddenly there was this new regulation. On this day, everyone has to wear a mask, and all these signs appeared.

Now, these signs were very large. They covered pillars in subway stations. You could sit at the entrance of the subway station and see half a dozen to a dozen of them, just from one spot. And they were monolingual Korean, and they were large, multicoloured and everywhere.

But, shortly thereafter, in a matter of days, appeared much smaller signs, A4-sized. And these signs had the same general message. Not as much detail. The larger Korean-language signs had details about where to buy masks. Each sign at each station had a little additional information about the nearby convenience store or location about where you could buy masks. These were absent in the other signs, and these other signs, much smaller, a little bit less well-produced, had the same general message in English, Chinese and Japanese. So, they appeared after. And this was quite interesting to us. These two signs appearing together. That’s one set of signs that were really important to us.

The other set of signs – we actually didn’t collect these signs entirely during the pandemic. Images of these signs were collected earlier. These were signs prohibiting the disposal of garbage, basically “don’t letter”. And there’s kind of a sophisticated system in Korea for the disposal of household garbage. A lot of apartment complexes will have a recycling system. Individuals can go buy garbage bags. Payment goes into funding the trash disposal system. So, some people litter to avoid this or because it can be inconvenient or whatever. So, this is a major issue. A lot of people get upset by trash. You don’t want trash in front of your house, and so there’s a lot of district-level government signs about prohibiting the disposal of garbage.

And what we found was that, in certain districts, these signs included Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, English and certain signs only had Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. No English. So that was quite interesting. And what’s also critical here is that Korean government signage rarely features Arabic and Vietnamese. Some English, some Chinese, but very rarely Arabic and Vietnamese. And very, very rarely on district-level signage. These are neighbourhood-level government signs. So, these were very unusual signs to see Vietnamese and Arabic being used in these ways.

And so, what happened was me and my co-authors – and my apologies for not mentioning Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim earlier, they are absolutely foundational to this whole project and they are continuing work on COVID-19 signs – but we decided to collect data from our daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic, just to better understand how signs were being used regarding COVID-19. And as we collected data, we examined it and looked at it in different ways. We were really struck by these “masks required” signs and these additional small multilingual signs. And what was really striking was there were other mask signs, signs that were encouraging mask use more generally and often quite powerfully using fear or sometimes cuteness to encourage mask wearing. But they were monolingual Korean. So, we were trying to understand what led to the additional signs requiring people to wear masks in English, Chinese and Japanese.

So, we were viewing literature and we started to look deeper into the context of signage in Korea, and we found the examples in our already-collected data of these garbage signs. And we really thought this might be the same phenomenon in two different ways – in the COVID-19 “masks required” signs we’re finding English, Chinese and Japanese as the languages to speak to the general non-Korean foreign public. And in the signs about garbage using Vietnamese and Arabic, we have the language used to speak to the Arabic and Vietnamese-speaking communities in these districts. So, we found different examples that were both the result of what we believed to be the same phenomenon.

So, our analysis of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape is ongoing, but we found these examples and decided to share sort of a conceptual paper that used these two examples to really look deeply at what we termed “multilingual commanding urgency”, and what we were finding being discussed in the literature. We wanted to bring that all together in one paper, use these different examples to really understand this phenomenon, discuss it and expand on it. That’s what came together in our paper. So, we argue that these two very different signs are ultimately the product of a belief that certain language communities are likely to be violators of a certain regulation, and a belief that by sharing the sign, making the sign in a certain language, you can reach that community and lower the enforcement burden for the authorities. So that’s how this paper came about.

Brynn: And that’s so interesting because, like we said, we all, as just people who are walking around in the world, are going to see these signs, could potentially read these signs. But a really interesting point that you make in your paper is that, exactly this, that these types of signs have the potential to be “overread by passersby”. You point out that these people might not actually be able to read the languages on these signs, so maybe if there’s a monolingual French speaker walking around in that context, they might not be able to read the languages, but they may know what languages they are. They might be able to say, “Oh I can tell that’s Arabic” or “I can tell that’s Vietnamese”. So, what inferences and assumptions might these passersby, who have nothing to do with the government, then make about the communities that are being addressed through these very specific language choices with these directive signs?

Dr Chesnut: So, this concept of “overreading signs” we borrowed from Philipp Angermeyer who has an amazing paper looking at Roma youth from Hungary in Toronto, Canada. Some youth centres and certain places started putting up signs in Hungarian, sort of codes of behaviour, to try and regulate what was perceived to be kind of inappropriate behaviour by these youth. He interviewed youth and authorities there. It’s an absolutely phenomenal paper. What he also pointed out was that these signs can be wrong. They used Google Translate to create the Hungarian, so in some cases it was really nonsensical. So, for these youth it was somewhat offensive, disheartening, disappointing to see not just signs about poor behaviour in a language directed to them, but also poor translations, signs they don’t even care enough to translate.

So, we’re discussing how, in general, these multilingual directive signs about bad behaviour can be overread potentially by anyone, sometimes even mistakenly, in a way that suggest certain communities might be responsible for this bad behaviour, engaging in this inappropriate behaviour or violating these regulations. So, if anyone is walking down the street and maybe you can read one language, maybe the dominant language is there, and you can read a sign saying something about disposal of pet waste, or smoking in an area you’re not supposed to smoke, and then you see it in certain languages that are very rarely used by authorities. It’s very easy to link those language speaking communities with this inappropriate behaviour, this aberrant behaviour.

So, that’s the concern, that these signs might reinforce larger public beliefs that certain communities are engaging in so-called bad behaviour, linking communities with problematic practices, and so really this could be having a negative effect on society, especially when languages are very rarely used in more general government or authoritative signage, or even more generally, and only used in these signs linked with bad behaviour. That’s the really problematic element.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s that perpetuation of a potential stereotype that exists within a community and, like you said, especially if it does come from that more governmental/district level position of power. Then that might perpetuate the stereotype even further.

You mentioned earlier that these particular trash signs came from a little earlier, but the paper was published in 2022. It’s now 2024 – have you seen any change in these types of signs in the intervening years? Are there still these “problem communities” that are being targeted through specific multilingual commanding urgency signs around Seoul?

Dr Chesnut: Well, there are certainly signs like this still about. There was an absolutely fantastic paper about a district with a large Chinese community in Seoul, and that paper had amazing examples, and kind of heartbreaking examples of signs only in Korean that request people to report others for bad behaviour, and then signs only in Chinese saying, “Don’t engage in problematic behaviour like public drunkenness and other inappropriate acts.” So certainly, this still exists now. That paper is from a little while ago too, so some of these signs might have changed.

And certainly, a lot of COVID signs have been taken down. Some remain. But I suspect these are long-enduring signs, metal signs posted on walls, so I suspect many of them are still up. I’ve seen signs that are ten years old. They remain for a long time. And I do want to point out that I think this is a kind of global phenomenon. I think signs like this can be found all over the world, so I wouldn’t single out any city or particular region, but I haven’t seen any major changes that way.

What I have seen that’s encouraging is that I’ve started to see some emergency signage that’s being made more multilingual, so we have a lot of emergency shelter signs and emergency shelters in Seoul. A lot of the time I’ve seen them in Korean, sometimes Korean-English and sometimes Korean-English-Chinese. But I recently saw one that had Korean, and that was the largest language by far. English was the second largest. Beneath that was Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. So, that I would not consider multilingual commanding urgency. That’s maybe a different type of language phenomenon, a different type of sign, and so there might be a move towards more multilingualism in general. That would certainly potentially lessen the potential for overreading certain directive signs. So, that would also be the policy I would advocate.

There is a need for signs directing people not to dispose of trash illegally, and if you want to reach out to a community then reach out in many ways. Not just through this directive signage but include that language on many different signs so it becomes less significant with this problematic directive. So, I do see some positive developments in more general multilingualism, but I think these signs do remain and I think they do have a purpose, so I hope there are some positive developments.

Since COVID I’ve also been out a lot less and I have family responsibilities these days that are new, so I’m collecting less general data and I don’t quite observe as much as I used to. So, I hope that’s a reasonable answer.

Brynn: It is, and what I love too about your paper and about this type of work into the linguistic landscape is that any person walking around in their own community, whether they’re here in Australia, whether they’re in Korea or Canada, they can pay attention to this, you know? You don’t have to be a scientist; you don’t have to be a linguist. Just notice. What do you see? Do you see multilingualism, kind of like you were saying in the context of everyone can read an emergency sign or subway rules, things like that? Or do you only see only very particular languages and therefore language communities being targeted with the signs? So, they are two quite different things.

And I love that it’s something where, once you’re aware of it, you can’t stop seeing. Ever since I read your paper, I now do that, where I just walk around and observe that in my own community.

And you said that you don’t maybe necessarily get to collect this type of data as much these days, but what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Chesnut: Our team, Sungwoo Kim and Nate Ming Curran and myself, we’re all still working on our COVID-19 linguistic landscape data, and this potentially could be lifetime work. There’s a lot there, and a lot more that can be done still.

So, right now we have a draft of a paper looking at English usage on authoritative government COVID-19 signage. What we’re looking at is how English is used in at least two very different ways. It’s used in one way for signs intended for a domestic Korean audience, and that’s very interesting to see English used for a Korean domestic audience for non-commercial purposes. It’s not marketing, it’s not cool English necessarily. It’s not trying to create a sense of cosmopolitanism. It’s trying to reinforce good public health behaviour, and we find English being used where the English text itself conveys information. The English has a meaning-making purpose. Not as a symbol, but information is bound into the text.

But it’s also being used as a symbol or a design feature or an emblematic element. It’s being used for Korean-English punning. It’s being used with Korean-English blends where there’s one message that switches between English and Korean to convey a particular message to the public, the Korean public. So, we’re very interested in how English is being used for public health messaging to a Korean audience.

And we’re also seeing English being used for a foreign non-Korean audience of visitors or residents. And what’s interesting there is that very often English is being used alongside Chinese or Japanese as a part of this broad multilingual communication strategy, and that kind of challenges the idea that English is this ultimate language, this lingua franca. That, in fact, it’s being used alongside other languages as part of this broad multilingual strategy except for particular foreign places where we do see monolingual English language signage in this Korean bilingual signage.

And sometimes, multilingualism that goes beyond Korean-English-Japanese-Chinese where there are six languages or eight languages in a particular foreign place. And we do find a few examples, especially early in the pandemic, where there is English that is difficult to understand, and we do want to address that too, and the Korean was actually a little bit odd too. So, it may be a result more of confusion earlier in the pandemic. The messages were unclear both in Korean and English, and that’s something that should be addressed too.

So, we’re looking at that, and we’ll continue looking at the linguistic landscape. We have a beginning of a paper looking at Chinese signage with the heavy concern of overreading, of how Chinese signage may have been overread during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea. And we want to address how there was private sector signage that was very explicit. Basically, Chinese guests were not welcome. They were told not to enter certain restaurants or institutions. So, we want to address, or bring into academic discussion, the fact that these signs exist and that they were done bilingually in Korean and Chinese and that there are big issues there. That’s another project that’s probably further in the future.

We’ve already published another paper, it’s actually a blog that’s open access. Anyone can read it. It’s quite short. It looks at cuteness and fear in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape. What we saw was a lot of signage, a little bit from authoritative signage, but a lot of private sector signage. So, cafes and restaurants that had signs saying “please wear a mask” but they used a lot of cuteness. Little anime-like figures asking you, “please wear a mask for me”, or cartoon figures with their masks saying, “be like me”, that type of thing. So, there was a lot of cuteness deployed in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, and we went to an online symposium for that, and then we shared it in a blog as part of that, so “Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape”. Google and you can find the blog and find all the entries there. It’s quite interesting.

And we also, in that piece, talked about fear. There were a few government posters that really strongly attempted to invoke fear. “Wear your proper COVID-19 mask, or you’ll end up wearing a respirator mask in the hospital.” Really strong invoking of fear there. And there were other messages as well, using fear this way.

And in the conference, it was quite interesting. There was a public health expert who joined the conference, and it was quite wonderful he was there. But he was surprised. He was from South Africa, and he said, “We could never use signs like this in our context. They’d be inappropriate. No one would respond to them positively.” But he was very eager to learn what could be done, how we can use signs to successfully promote good public health practices.

Unfortunately, this type of research doesn’t give an easy answer besides, I think, an answer saying that communicating in more languages in general, not specifically with a punitive message, is probably a good productive practice. But ultimately going deeper into that question would be an interesting long-term goal but would require very different research methods. So, maybe that’s something to think about in the future. There’s a lot to be done.

It would be wonderful to better understand communication through signs and other means of course, but I’m doing more research in signs, involving public health and emergencies and disasters and how those signs can be made in a way that is more productive and helpful, less damaging, less concerning in other ways, and better understand all these issues.

Unfortunately, the world remains a very dangerous place. Other events will occur, not exactly the same as the COVID-19 pandemic, but conflict, war, tsunamis, earthquakes – all these things can occur. All may require changing our behaviour as members of the public, and that can be shaped to some extent by these publicly displayed signs. Huge posters in the subway. Things on the bus. All manner of signs in an airport or any public institution. Private businesses, restaurants, cafes and more, all sharing signs that can inform the public about what to do in case of some unfortunate event, can maybe have a role in creating a better society to some extent.

So, we’re going to keep working on this, I think. There’s a lot more that could be done.

Brynn: It sounds like you said, it could be a lifetime worth of research. That’s so much to draw from. And like you said, it is something that I think we all have to take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, to kind of look back and say, “Alright, what did we not anticipate? What did we get wrong, and how can we better prepare in the future so that we can communicate better so that we can make sure that people from any language background can receive the information that they need in that type of a crisis?” So that sounds absolutely fascinating, and on that, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dr Chesnut: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute delight. As I mentioned earlier, it is rare to get an opportunity to talk about a research paper, not a big book, not a big project, but just one paper. And this is a paper I’m quite fond of and a research project I find interesting. So, it has been a delight to get to talk with you. Thank you so much for all the wonderful and engaging questions. They really helped direct me and hopefully keep me on task. I really appreciate your guidance there.

And yes, hopefully this encourages more members of the public to keep an eye out for signs and look for those directive signs that are made multilingual in unusual ways. And for researchers out there, this is an exciting area to research. Don’t be afraid, I don’t think researchers are afraid, but this is a productive place to do research, and the more people examining this topic, the richer the discussions become. So, I’m always eager to find new people entering the field and discussing these topics.

Brynn: Excellent, so get out there and go look at some signs!

And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

Hospital corridor, by Sadami Konchi ©

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Erin Mulpur about how hospitals can provide linguistic minority patients with access to interpreting services.

Erin holds a Master of Public Health and is the System Director at Houston Methodist Global Health Care Services in Houston, Texas, United States.

The conversation addresses the potential barriers to both communication and healthcare that linguistic minority patients may face in hospitals, as well as Erin’s 2021 paper Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic which details Houston Methodist Hospital’s innovative use of a particular language assistance technology during the first waves of Covid-19.

This episode is a natural extension of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller’s chat with Dr Jim Hlavac, so be sure to listen to both episodes!

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel, leaving a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Artwork

The artwork in this post is from Sadami Konchi’s hospital collection. To learn more about Sadami Konchi’s art visit her website or follow her on Instagram.

Surgery, by Sadami Konchi ©

Reference

Mulpur, E., & Turner, T. (2021). Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 23(5), 1126-1128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-021-01251-2

Episode Transcript

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Erin Mulpur. Erin holds a Master of Public Health and is the System Director at Houston Methodist Global Health Care Services in Houston Texas, United States. Today we are going to talk in general about her work with hospital patients from non English-speaking backgrounds, and in particular about the 2021 paper that she co-authored with Travis Turner entitled “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic”.

Welcome to the show, Erin. It’s lovely to have you.

Erin: Thank you so much, Brynn. I am delighted to be here today.

Brynn: So, can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in working with hospital patients from non-English speaking backgrounds, and what kind of work do you do now?

Erin: Absolutely. So, I originally grew up in Montana, a state in the US, and I actually grew up on an Indian reservation. It was the Flathead Indian reservation, so the Salish and Kootenai tribes both lived on that reservation. At a young age, I had a deep, deep desire, instilled by my family, to be respectful of all cultures, and also a deep understanding that language is such a vital part to people’s culture. It’s their voice, it’s how they articulate themselves in the world, and when there isn’t a shared language, then it’s really difficult to connect.

Nurse, by Sadami Konchi ©

And so, at a young age that is definitely something that was a part of my life. Moving on, I went to graduate school and, you know, went to undergrad and then to graduate school, and ended up getting my Masters in Public Health after spending some time in Uganda working for a government-run hospital in Iganga District. And again, this focus on wanting to deeply understand other cultures, be respectful of other cultures, and understanding that language is such a vital part of that – it really led me into this role at Houston Methodist, where I am now.

So, what I do at Houston Methodist, I’ve been here for about 10 years, and I oversee our Special Constituent Management Program and also our Global Patient Services Program. So, what that means is that we have patients who travel from over 70 countries from around the world, speak multiple different languages, and they are facilitated by an amazing team here at Houston Methodist that I have the privilege to work with every day. And my staff come from over 30 countries from around the world. They speak so many different languages, and it’s this beautiful, diverse scenery where we have the ability to take care of patients from different backgrounds, different cultures here at out hospital because they travel to Houston for care.

And we also oversee our Domestic Language Program. So, when you think about it from a healthcare perspective, when a physician walks into a room and he notices that a patient does not speak English, he or she is not thinking, “Is this patient traveling internationally, or is this patient a local patient from our community?”. So, our team, my team, has the privilege to take care of both of those patient populations here at this hospital.

And for those who may not know as much about Houston, TX, we are the fastest-growing diverse city in the United States. So, over 40% of people over the age of 5 speak another language than English in our city, and so when you think about that, over 140 languages are spoken in our city. And when we just looked at our data last year, over 70 languages are spoken just by patients at our hospital. So, it’s so, so important to think about language assistance and think about making sure that patients understand the care that they’re receiving, and that is what I’m doing today.

Treatment room, by Sadami Konchi ©

Brynn: That is fascinating, and what an amazing opportunity to do that kind of work. That’s incredible. So, can you tell us what are some common barriers that patients face if they don’t have a high level of English proficiency and seek treatment at an English-dominant hospital? And this could apply at Houston, but it could also apply to where I’m coming from in Sydney, Australia.

Erin: Absolutely. Absolutely, Brynn. I would say that everything can be a barrier, honestly. When you think about patients navigating a website to a hospital – is the website available in multiple languages? If the patient is calling the call centre to schedule an appointment, is that call centre offering language assistance? Are there options to push for Spanish or Arabic or Vietnamese? What is that infrastructure around language assistance? So, I can say that everything is a barrier if it’s not thought about and intentional to make sure that you’re opening access to everyone, not just English-speaking patients.

And that’s what we see here at Houston Methodist, and that’s why we have created content that’s in multiple languages. That’s why we have our phone system that can be in multiple languages. We have so much infrastructure and technology because we know that if you don’t create that, then patients don’t have a voice.

Brynn: Absolutely, and I absolutely agree. And that brings us to your paper, “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic”. This is a fascinating paper, and if anyone has the chance to read it, I would highly recommend. So, can you tell us a bit about something called the Vocera Smartbadge? What is that, and how was your hospital already using it before the Covid-19 pandemic struck?

Erin: Absolutely, so our nurses, prior to Covid, had what is referred to as a Vocera Smartbadge. The way that I would articulate that is that it’s like a smart walkie-talkie where you can dial in, you have the ability to ask the device to call other departments and other services, and so it was really leveraged and utilised amongst the clinical team for patient care. So, if the nurse was in a room, needed another nurse, she could push the button and she could say, “Dial this nurse in this other room”, and so it had that technology and was utilised in that way prior to Covid. It was really helpful because it allowed a hands-free way to care for patients, but also have the ability to connect with other people on the care team.

Brynn: And I think for those of us who’ve been in hospitals before, we’ve seen this happen with handheld phones. We’ve seen nurses be in hospital rooms and call each other on handheld phones, so from my understanding, the Vocera Smartbadge is really kind of that same idea, but, like you said, hands-free, and it’s more voice command, voice-activated.

Treatment, by Sadami Konchi ©

Erin: Absolutely, so it can attach to the lapel or a jacket, and you don’t have to dial anything, you can push a button and you can ask the Vocera device to call into a directory that has already been created.

Brynn: Exactly, and so your hospital, during Covid-19, was able to use the Vocera Smartbadge in a really novel way to provide language services to patients during the pandemic. Can you tell us how that happened and what you observed?

Erin: Absolutely, so unfortunately, with the Covid pandemic, here in the US and in many other countries, we had a limited supply of personal protective equipment. So, I currently have staff who provide in-person interpretation. So, you think about any time an in-person, someone needs to go into the room and provide in-person interpretation, they would have to don and doff gowns. So, with the limited supply of PPE, really the goal was to just use PPE for people who were physically clinically caring for the patient to keep them safe. So, it was really a difficult time to think about, “How are we going to provide language assistance and still keep with that value of ours and making sure that our patients understand the care they are receiving, but not have enough PPE for our in-person interpreters?”

So, what we ended up doing is we ended up integrating our technology around language assistance. Over the phone interpretation was then embedded within that Vocera device to where a nurse who was in PPE, speaking with a patient who was limited English proficient, would have the ability to dial in an over-the-phone interpreter and that patient would still be able to hear, from the nurse’s chest, to that patient to be able to understand the care that they’re receiving, and receive care in the language that is needed to them. That was something that we were able to do. We were able to stand that up fairly quickly because we already had the Vocera device in action and already utilised across our system. It made it really, really easy for us to be able to do it once we were able to accomplish that.

What we found during some of the waves during the Covid pandemic, a few of the surges of patients, there was a large Latino population that ended up receiving care at our hospital that were Spanish speaking. So, it came right in the nick of time, I would say, for us to be able to have that in-person, that interpretation provided by the nurse between the patient and the nurse.

Brynn: And that’s so important because, part of the research that I’ve been doing has been looking into the disparities, the health disparities between majority language speakers and linguistic minorities. We know that there was a larger Covid-19 mortality amongst linguistic minority patients. So, the fact that you were able to integrate this technology could have made the difference, literally, between life and death for patients. So, that is fantastic that that was able to happen.

Patient, by Sadami Konchi ©

You mentioned this, this is something that I found really interesting in your paper, was that concept of the voice coming from the person’s chest because the Vocera Smartbadge was located on the chest, so it was almost like that interpreting voice was coming from the healthcare provider which, as we know, can sometimes be something that is tricky to deal with. When there is this, especially over the phone interpreting, or video interpreting, is this idea of distance between the person who is trying to receive the healthcare and then the healthcare provider. So, the fact that it was literally coming from the healthcare provider’s chest, I think, made it that much more valuable.

Erin: Absolutely, no you’re absolutely right, Brynn. When talking with patients and, you know, hearing their experience with that, they understood the limited amount of PPE, and they also understood and felt that that connection with the nurse and having that voice be so close to the person’s heart, it allowed it to be more intimate than it otherwise has been in the past with some of the technology that has been created around language assistance.

Brynn: Absolutely, thank you. Sort of shifting gears a little bit, what do you feel is something that people, generally monolingual English-speaking or Americans or, even in my case, monolingual English-speaking Australians, I know I don’t sound Australian, I’m originally American, obviously. What do you think is something that those people get wrong when they think of people from non-English speaking backgrounds who seek treatment in predominantly English-speaking hospitals?

Erin: That’s a great question, Brynn, and I would have to say that there’s a tremendous amount of unconscious bias that can occur in a healthcare setting, and even outside of a healthcare setting. It persists in the world that we live in, and so that unconscious bias can impact the provider, it can impact the patient, and so what I would say is – have no assumptions. Be curious. Always be willing to learn something new.

So, as an example, in the role I’m in, I work with patients who are coming from the Middle East, and there are Muslim men who come to our hospital for care, and I know that I’m not to extend my hand. It’s a sign of respect in US culture to extend your hand and to shake someone else’s hand, but in other cultures it’s not necessarily seen as respectful. So, that is something that I have had to learn and implement into my life and my routine. That’s the piece around monolingual cultures, I think it’s important to draw no assumptions. To be curious, and to be open to learning. And, when you’re open to learning, you’re also open to making mistakes. Once you’ve made a mistake because, maybe you find out that you have unconscious bias that you’re not aware of, change. Adapt. Evolve. Learn. Continue to grow. Be curious about other cultures.

Brynn: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. In your opinion, what can hospitals do to ensure that linguistic minority patients can access care in a language they can understand?

Patient, by Sadami Konchi ©

Erin: I would say, Brynn, that depending on where these hospitals are located – I know that not all hospitals are looking at this data. Maybe some hospitals don’t even have data to look at. So, you know, in our system, we have an electronic medical health records system, and we utilise EPIC. We’re able to see, based on how that patient is flagged within EPIC, we’re able to see if they need language assistance or not. So, we’re able to see that data, and we’re able to implement solutions and structure and infrastructure and policies around that.

For other hospitals, maybe there are some hospitals that don’t have that kind of access to data, and so what I loved about your paper, Brynn, is that you’re looking at what is the community? What is the language of the community that you’re serving? If you don’t have the data within your hospital, expand to your population. What languages are spoken in your population? Those people are coming to your hospital for care. So, what language programs and language assistance do you need to set up to make sure that these patients feel seen and valued and heard? That is something that I think is so important.

And if you don’t have that expertise, it’s ok! There are consultants. There are different organisations, I mean we have a consulting arm to our operations as well. We have the ability to come in and advise, but be ok asking for support and expertise outside if you don’t have that infrastructure created, because, ultimately, what will happen in any hospital setting, is if a patient receives care that does not share the language of the provider, and they consent, or they end up having a surgery, and they have some sort of complication that they were not aware of, the legal risks and the lawsuits that come from patients not understanding their care are so grave for organisations. So, first and foremost, providing language assistance is just the right thing to do. It’s just the right thing to do. If that’s not convincing you enough, there are major financial risks if you do not provide language assistance to patients.

Brynn: 100%, absolutely. So, before we wrap up, can you tell us what’s next for you and your work? It sounds like you all are doing some truly amazing work at Houston Methodist, and I would just love to know where you go from here.

Erin: Yes, so as you can hear from my history, I am a bridge-builder. I like to bridge people to have access and resources and understanding. So, I love the idea of building bigger bridges in the future so more people have access to care, more people understand the care that they’re receiving. I also believe that when you look at healthcare right now, it’s being so rapidly disrupted. There’s so much technology that is being pushed into healthcare. You see so much artificial intelligence as well being utilised in healthcare. That is where I see language assistance going next, but it could be leveraged. I do think artificial intelligence will be leveraged in a healthcare setting in the future and even with language assistance in the future.

But artificial intelligence will never take away from human connection. It will never take away from in-person interpretation and from a person being seen, heard and valued by a person who physically is there with them and is able to speak their language. But when you think about the amount of care that patients receive at a hospital – there’s nurses rounding on them, physicians rounding on them, specialists, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists – there’s all sorts of people that are part of the clinical care team that help that patient while they’re here. Being able to allow them access to multimodalities for language assistance just means that that patient is getting as much language assistance as they can while they’re at our hospital. So, I do see the bridge getting bigger and wider in the future, and I see technology being a big part of that. And that is really where we are looking in the future here at Houston Methodist.

Brynn: And I love that idea of, yes, there’s absolutely a place for these technologies that we’re seeing expanding and developing, but that, at the core, we as humans still need other humans. We need that human connection and interaction that human interpreting can provide.

With that said, Erin, thank you so much for speaking with us today. We really appreciate it, and I feel like our listeners have learned a lot. Thank you.

Erin: Wonderful, thank you so much, Brynn, it has been such a pleasure connecting today.

Any wicked problem is an occasion for different people to have different reasonable but often incompatible ideas about how to approach it. Chief Health Officers might properly emphasize health-related aspects of the problem, whereas Chief Executive Officers of major firms might emphasize aspects of the problem relevant to the economy.

Both these takes (and others) are reasonable and yet they are potentially incompatible; the economy can’t be both open (to protect it) and closed (to slow the spread of disease). Each approach would be only partially successful in addressing the overall problem; each approach leaves a nasty remainder. Wicked problems don’t have sweet spot solutions.

What seems to have happened in Australia is that these two, and other, perspectives were politically mediated, so that Chief Health Officers didn’t get as much as they would have liked, but neither did CEOs. If there was no sweet spot, at least it seemed to be possible to avoid the bitterest spots; there was a partial “solution” on which otherwise differently-minded participants converged … and it was compromise between those with different perspectives that made this possible.

Social Media

Another set of ideas involves the rise of internet facilitated social media platforms that enable individuals to say to many others whatever they choose.

Social media form an archipelago (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The social media landscape is an archipelago, with islands of intensely intercommunicating participants separated by large gaps across which communication is fitful and low-fidelity, indeed often grossly distorted.

These islands are created by a convergence of basic human psychology and social media tools.

The psychology is that we like to be in groups whose members share our thinking and feeling (cf. social comparison theory, à la Leon Festinger.) The social media tools – of likes, shares, and follows – make it easy for us to join such groups.

Importantly, these islands of the like-minded often quickly become echo chambers, where (think QAnon) participants drive each other to more extreme versions of the thoughts they share and to greater degrees of orthodoxy in their thinking.

Again, the psychology is simple. Membership is conditional upon the alignment of a person’s thinking with the thinking characteristic of the group. If a new member has reservations about the group’s characteristic thinking – for example because they recognise that there are multiple perspectives and that the focal problem for the group is, in fact, a wicked problem – they might opt out, but, if not, they will need to silence their reservations in order to be comfortable, psychologically, in their membership (this is dissonance reduction à la Festinger) … indeed, in order to avoid being driven out. Once reservations are silenced all around, it becomes a race to the bottom, with various members competing with one another to express their commitment to the group.

What happens when wicked problems encounter social media echo chambers?

The Epistemological Crisis

Because a wicked problem has only partial solutions, we’re all, inevitably, going to have to decide which aspect is important to us and which we’re going to treat as unhappy remainders of our chosen approach.

What’s different with the rise of social media is that we can now find insulated and uncurated space, where everyone agrees with us about which approach to a wicked problem is better and where the game within that space is to ignore the unpleasant side-effects of the socially preferred approach and to enforce orthodoxy about this preference within the group.

And this explains what we plainly witness, namely, the polarisation of “discussion” on social media platforms where a self-stirring group which has one preferred approach to a wicked problem demonizes other also self-stirring groups which have other approaches to this problem, despite the possibility that none of these approaches is an unreasonable one and that all of them represent only partial “solutions”. Each group could be seeing an aspect that’s relevant to the problem, but they’re not able to acknowledge that the other groups might also be seeing aspects that are relevant, because what the other groups are seeing are aspects that they have had to discount, for dissonance reduction, as bad consequences of their own favored approach.

The inhabitants of each such echo chamber just ignore the inhabitants of others or, worse still, exchange insults across the gaps that separate them. Indeed, there are polarisation entrepreneurs working the social media to demonise those outside any given echo chamber as morally depraved, or perhaps craven (“sheeple” is a word that’s been used), or so befuddled by “fake news” that it would be pointless and immoral to engage with them.

These are the mechanisms that have given us the epistemological crisis of contemporary culture, manifested, for example, in science scepticism, distrust of experts, intolerance, fundamentalism, authoritarianism, populism, polarisation, erosion of civility, and an unwillingness to engage in constructive discussion or to compromise with “others”.

What’s the alternative to such mutual assured demonisation?

The Principle of Civility

Whenever we encounter people whose views are different from our own, we should attribute to them as much wisdom, knowledge, and good judgment as we’d like them to attribute to us. The Golden Rule, in other words. We don’t assume, from the bare fact of their disagreeing with us, that our interlocutors are stupid or ignorant or evil. More importantly, we try to consider not just what they believe but how they came to believe as they do. This crucially involves listening to them.

And perhaps, by listening, we discover that, though we wouldn’t have, indeed didn’t, think things through the same way they did, they nevertheless did think things through … and maybe even in a way that makes sense to us. In some cases, we will indeed “get it” why they believe what they do. In some cases, we will perhaps see aspects of the issue that we, through social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms, or maybe just from perspectival effects, didn’t initially see.

And when we execute civility in this sense, we don’t demonize our “opponents”; we humanize them. And, crucially, we make it easier for them to humanize us; perhaps our civility will be reciprocated. And when that does happen, we can, together, create a space where we’re interested in each other … where we’re not just trying to score points or to win favor with our own in-group. Where we’re trying to expand the circle of our fellows to include rather than exclude those who aren’t just like us, in order, if we’re lucky, to build a compromise between us … a solution that gives each of us some, but unavoidably not all, of what we’re looking for.

Civility requires discipline. There are social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms that we need to be aware of and to rein in if we are to exercise civility. It also requires institutional settings in which different points of view can be brought together. But it’s by exercising this discipline in such settings that we can engineer compromises as an alternative to the war of all against all that increasingly constitutes our cultural situation.

Figure 1: Notice at village turn back point (Weibo screenshot)

There has been ongoing international debate over China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the specific language and semiotic resources used in China to enforce local measures to contain the pandemic require further assessment.

As a Chinese person living overseas, I have become aware of disturbing narratives around the coronavirus pandemic through my engagement with Weibo. In this post, I report my observations of selected COVID-related signs created by local authorities in China. These grassroots COVID-19 linguistic landscapes, I argue, suggest creative language use but convey exclusionary ideologies.

Roadblocks and fear

A key feature of COVID-19 linguistic landscapes in local rural communities in China is the use of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn from the immediate environment where such signs are placed. An example is Figure 1, which shows a sign stuck on a blackboard placed in the middle of the road. The sign reads:

亲情告示
各位父老乡亲，疫情依然严重，防控期间严禁出门，严守规矩，我们这没有雷神山，没有火神山，没有钟南山，只有抬上山！大家尽量别出去，别出去，别出去！别让大家的努力前功尽弃！！！
Kind Notice
Dear elders, relatives, and fellow villagers, since the pandemic is still severe, going out is strictly forbidden and rigid adherence to the rules are expected during the prevention and control period. There is no Leishenshan (Thunder God Hill Hospital), nor Huoshenshan (Fire God Hill Hospital), nor Zhong Nanshan (Pulmonary Specialist), but Taishangshan (lifting the bodies up the hill). Everyone please don’t go out, don’t go out, don’t go out! Don’t let all our efforts end up in vain! [my translation]

This sign was posted by the villagers’ committee in an early attempt to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. The word play of the last syllable 山([ʂan]) in Leishenshan, Huoshenshan, Zhong Nanshan, and Taishangshan adds playfulness and strength to the message.

For background: Thunder God Hill Hospital and Fire God Hill Hospital were temporary hospitals used specifically to treat COVID-19 patients in Wuhan. The construction of these hospitals was completed within just two weeks during the early outbreak of the coronavirus. Zhong Nanshan is a widely trusted infectious disease expert who won acclamation for coordinating diagnosis and treatment efforts during the SARS outbreak in 2008.

Figure 2. Red banner addressing village returnees (Weibo screenshot)

Villages obviously have none of these resources.

Due to the lack of hospital facilities and medical experts in this rural area, ‘Taishangshan’ is intended as a joke but also as a warning to villagers of the potentially lethal outcome of getting infected with COVID-19 – up the hill is a grave for those who might not survive. More importantly, the notice not only enforces the stay-at-home order linguistically but, positioned at the middle of the road, the blackboard on which the notice was stuck and the bamboo pole at the back physically act as a barricade restricting the mobility of people attempting to go to and from the village.

At the same time, this sign not only serves to warn and protect but may also ignite fear and prompt more extreme measures to segregate the healthy from the infected because of the implied gravity of the pandemic.

Red banners and defamatory discourses

There is also a particular genre of signs that single out members of the overseas Chinese community and portray them as the ‘culprits’ in spreading the coronavirus. These signs are situated within a broader discourse around returning overseas Chinese who fail to comply with quarantine regulations after entry into China. After countless reproductions in the online space, the debate quickly escalated into hate speech targeting all returnees.

Figure 2 illustrates an extreme example of this narrative. The image depicts a red banner which blatantly states “带病回村 不孝子孙”, meaning “returning village with disease, what an unfilial child you are”. This denigrating statement not only employs a rhythmic rhetorical device (村 [tsʰʊən] and 孙 [sʊən]) but also conjures the potential breach of filial piety – a core cultural and moral value in Confucianism and a powerful social norm in the governance of compact rural communities with their inherited patriarchal clan social system and close ties between parents and children – to warn against the movement of travellers.

Figure 3. A ‘Positive Building’ blocked by green fences (Weibo screenshot)

Red banners represent a specific genre of ideological propaganda that can be found in both cities and rural villages, although their political connotation has often given way to pragmatic usage in modern Chinese society. This disheartening message suggests a flat rejection of returning villagers from overseas and internal migrants from other provinces by characterising them as infectious and unfilial. It also discourages those who are worried about becoming the target of criticism from travelling because there is a slight chance that they might be infected and contagious yet asymptomatic during the incubation period.

A viral phrase that was part of this discourse asserts that “家乡建设你不在，万里投毒你最快” (You were absent in the hometown’s construction, but now you are travelling from afar and spreading poison most swiftly), again blaming overseas Chinese returnees for spreading the virus even though only a few members of this group were reportedly disobedient with relevant preventative procedures.

Building fences and symbolic deterrence

Such exclusionary ideologies continued to be reproduced in the recent Shanghai lockdown, starting in March 2022. As Figure 3 shows, fences were installed around the entrances to residential buildings. This type of ‘hard quarantine’ was often implemented by street or neighbourhood committees to segregate ‘lockdown zones’ (residential areas with reported positive cases) or ‘positive buildings’, as per municipal policy requirements. These fences were not made of sturdy materials, however, and did not appear to be strong or tall enough to prevent genuine rule-breakers and were more likely serving as a symbolic deterrence to residents and visitors.

For ‘controlled zones’ (other areas in communities or towns where lockdown zones are located) and ‘precautionary zones’ (areas outside lockdown zones and controlled zones), other forms of fencing were observed. Figure 4 shows the use of road fences bearing the notice “安全生产，文明施工” (Safe production, Civilised construction). This represents the appropriation of a sign from a construction site to a new context — COVID prevention and control (Curtin, 2015).

Figure 4. A ‘controlled zone’ blocked by road fences (Weibo screenshot)

Unlike the green ones, these fences were not fixed to the ground, and their portability allowed people some mobility. In a sense, the types of material objects employed as passage blockers are suggestive of allowable human movement and thus the severity of restriction. The emplacement of language in this physical environment (in front of a residential building) not only deprives the text of its original meaning but also endows it with a sarcastic perlocutionary effect, as ‘civilised’ contradicts the stringent COVID restriction measures in the broader context. It should be noted that, as I was writing this blog post, the Shanghai lockdown was lifted (on 1 June), and the removal of these fences soon followed.

In summary, I have discussed some examples of grassroots COVID signs that were created using a variety of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn from the local surroundings. These roadblocks, red banners, and building fences have illustrated the creative uses of languages including word play, rhetorical device and perlocutionary effect. Meanwhile, they constitute the COVID-19 linguistic landscape and bear witness to the proliferation of fear, defamation, and exclusion in this ongoing battle against the coronavirus.

Reference

Curtin, M. L. (2015). Creativity in polyscriptal typographies in the linguistic landscape of Taipei. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 236–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2015.1010315

Related content

For extended coverage of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, check out our COVID-19 archives at https://languageonthemove.com/covid-19/

Figure 1: Bilingual Squamish and English placard in West Vancouver’s Park Royal shopping village

As the Covid-19 pandemic heads toward its third year, with the Omicron variant in full swing, there is an ongoing need to reflect on language practices in multilingual contexts.

During my spring/summer 2021 research sabbatical in my West Vancouver home, I observed signs of the pandemic in every public space. As a sociolinguist, my ‘process of noticing’ centered around ‘language in use’ and social context. While the representation of multilingualism in globalized spaces is important to explore in ordinary times, Covid-induced disruptions to habituated social practices and familiarized communication patterns have shone a spotlight on linguistic diversity, access, inclusion, and social justice.

The City of Worlds – linguistic diversity in West Vancouver

Figure 2: Bilingual (English and Persian) bakery sign with monolingual (English) Covid-19 signs

Metro Vancouver, in which West Vancouver is one of its 21 municipalities, has many nicknames such as ‘Hollywood North’, ‘Lotusland’, ‘Raincouver’, ‘City of Glass’ and ‘City of Worlds’. The latter is perhaps the most apt owing not only to the area’s geographical diversity but also its highly multicultural and multilingual ecology. In West Vancouver, 41 percent of its population are immigrants. The two most commonly spoken languages other than English are Chinese and Persian with approximately 34 percent of recent immigrants to West Vancouver coming from China and 22 percent coming from Iran.

While English dominates West Vancouver’s linguistic landscape, languages other than English can also be seen, particularly in ‘sticky places’ or spaces which evoke feelings of cultural belonging and emotions such as ethnic grocery stores, cafes, or clubs. Bilingual signs in Canada’s two official languages, French and English, are also commonly seen in Federal spaces such as post offices or in national parks.

Initiatives to revitalize indigenous languages such as Squamish/Skwxwú7mesh have led to further representation of linguistic diversity on some street signs and on placards (Figure 1).

Linguistic diversity on Covid signage lagging behind

Despite the presence of languages other than English on a variety of non-Covid signage, when observing the proliferation of Covid signage in the pandemic’s second year, linguistic diversity was notably limited. For example, Covid signage in a Persian bakery (Figure 2) is monolingual (English only) despite the fact that non-Covid signage is bilingual (English and Persian).

Figure 3: Monolingual (English only) municipality-produced Covid-19 sign

In public spaces such as Ambleside Park, which runs parallel to West Vancouver’s seawall, municipality-produced Covid signage is in English only, with the use of local wildlife incorporated into signs, as seen by the eagle’s wingspan symbolizing the required two-meter social distancing rules (Figure 3). The use of wildlife to localize Covid social distancing signage has also been found in other areas of North America such as bear images in North Vancouver, ravens in the Yukon, and alligators in Florida. While such signage promotes inclusion of other living beings in the community, extensions to other languages are not evident.

Bilingual and trilingual Covid signs are rare, and consist of either Federal government-produced English/French signage such as the sign in transit on a Canada Post/Poste Canada van (Figure 4) or parts of English signs having been translated by community members as in library signage.

Figure 4: Bilingual (English and French) sign on a Canada Post/Poste Canada van

Even though only part of the large English Covid poster in the West Vancouver Memorial Library has been translated into Chinese and Persian (Figure 5), this translation effort stands out as important not only for accessing information in languages other than English but also for reinforcing spaces of belonging for linguistic minorities. To develop this practice further, the full poster could be translated rather than only the top part and attention could be given to making the languages on bilingual or trilingual signage equal in size and prominence. While some of the symbols used on the English poster communicate the message effectively without the need for words, other symbols are more ambiguous.

The right to write: Covid-19 care and resistance

More common than bilingual or trilingual Covid signs in West Vancouver are handmade artifacts indirectly related to Covid, containing symbols together with English slogans, known as ‘language objects’. While people in many places around the world displayed pictures of rainbows and hearts in their windows or on front doors, West Vancouverites tended to create signs of care, solidarity and hope in public spaces rather than in private homes. Slogans such as ‘smile’, ‘love’, ‘you’re the best’ appeared on objects in the environment, like stones or trees. The ‘language objects’ in Figure 6 serve no informational or utilitarian purpose, rather they portray messages of care, hope, positivity and solidarity during difficult times.

Figure 5: Trilingual signage (English, Chinese, and Persian) at the West Vancouver Memorial Library

Such language objects were monolingual (English only) with symbols such as hearts and smiles.

Another way in which the public interacted with the linguistic landscape of West Vancouver, was through grassroots homemade signs in the form of monolingual (English only) posters taped to trees, lamp posts or walls in public places. Such posters tended to voice political or philosophical viewpoints on the pandemic, as seen in Figure 7.

Concerns for freedom were expressed openly by ‘talking back to the linguistic landscape’, whereby residents felt they had the ‘right to write’ in public spaces. Such voices of resistance to Covid-related safety measures and restrictions seen in the West Vancouver linguistic landscape stood in sharp contrast the Covid linguistic landscapes in Abu Dhabi (where I had spent the first year of the pandemic) in which signs of resistance to Covid safety rules were notably absent.

Toward Covid signage accurately reflecting multilingual ecologies

Figure 6: Language objects in Ambleside Park showing care, positivity, and solidarity

In studies conducted during the onset of the pandemic in 2020, lack of access to information in minority languages was reported in a wide variety of international contexts. Those not proficient in the dominant language of a given context were often found to be excluded from receiving safety information in public spaces.

During the onset of the pandemic, the immediate need for swift assemblance of safety signage led sign-makers to use the linguistic resources they had at hand, often resulting in English being the default choice. However, a year later, Covid signage remains heavily skewed in favor of monolingual signage in dominant languages such as English, in the case of West Vancouver. Only federal Covid signs are bilingual (English and French), and there appear to be few efforts by community members to translate English Covid signs into commonly spoken languages.

Figure 7: Monolingual (English only) grassroots sign voicing resistance to Covid-19 restrictions

For inclusivity goals to be better met, language on signage needs to match languages spoken in specific speech communities. Especially during a crisis, the importance of addressing the mismatch between the language chosen for public communication and the language repertoires of the target audience is amplified with regard to safety as well as a sense of belonging and value during difficult times.

Lessons learned from the pandemic’s first two years include the need for language on Covid signage to accurately reflect multilingual ecologies in highly diverse contexts for greater safety, care, and inclusion, especially amidst current Omicron concerns.

More on Covid-19 crisis communication

Keep up with all our Covid-19 crisis communication coverage on the Language on the Move Covid-19 archives.

An area under “total lockdown” (Image credit: rappler.com)

Lockdowns everywhere

The lockdown discourse has become ubiquitous, especially in current affairs and social media. In fact, ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ have been designated word of the year 2020 by Collins and Cambridge dictionaries, respectively.

Talk about restrictions on travel, curfew, and onsite capacity limits are particularly salient in countries that, unfortunately, continue to battle waves of the modern-day virus that does not even need to be named. The word ‘pandemic’ used in the present context has become synonymous to the still-evolving COVID-19 virus that started plaguing the world in early 2020.

Less straightforward, however, is the nuanced vocabulary that has been created around the notion of lockdown.

What does “lockdown” mean?

Different nation-state governments have developed their own nomenclatures for public health safety protocols.

In the Philippines, the Department of Health introduced the phrase ‘community quarantine’ (CQ) to refer to area-specific mobility restrictions intended to reduce virus transmission.

Depending on the severity of cases in different parts of the archipelagic state, the government may differentially impose four levels of CQ—enhanced CQ, modified enhanced CQ, general CQ, or modified general CQ. The lowest level is termed ‘new normal’ which is defined as the situation where, with significant reduction in the threat of virus transmission, only minimum public health standards will remain enforced. This, however, still involves practicing new routines and habits, such as mask wearing and avoiding large gatherings.

Using these terminologies and understanding what they mean were part of my adjustment since managing to fly back to Manila just when restrictions were beginning to tighten in Sydney.

You need a solid level of English and literacy to understand these lockdown rules and alert levels

The effectiveness of these protocols and their implementation, however, has been questioned in light of the still increasing number of reported new cases of COVID-19 infection (Pajaron & Vasquez, 2021).

The latest response by the Department of Health is to introduce new quarantine vocabulary: ‘granular lockdown’ which refers to micro-level quarantine for critical areas that have a surge in COVID-19 cases.  Beginning September 16, 2021, 57 areas in the National Capital Region were put under granular lockdown. This means individuals staying in houses, residential buildings, streets, blocks, villages, or barangays that have been identified as ‘critical areas’ are forced to strictly stay indoors for 14 consecutive days. As affected households absolutely cannot leave their residence, the local government units and social welfare department are in charge of sending them food, and military officials are stationed in the areas to ensure compliance.

Along with this new quarantine protocol is a new five-level alert system, which provisionally takes the place of the CQs. A description of the activities that are (dis)allowed in each level is provided by explainers circulated in social media. Information campaign tools, like the ones in the image, however, do not necessarily guarantee public comprehension or compliance.

Are Filipinos deliberately breaking the rules?

Indubitably, the construction of such public health protocols and nomenclature is necessary. But it is difficult to perceive their effectiveness in light of the continued spread of the virus.

This persistent problem has been blamed partly on people who allegedly, deliberately ignore the rules. Colloquially labelled pasaway [naughty], this group of delinquents includes those living below the poverty line, who need to fend for themselves on a daily basis in order to survive. Between August 21 and September 15, 2021 alone, the Philippine National Police reported 224,626 violators in Metro Manila and 1,153,833 in the nearby provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal.

These monitored lockdown violations rival the reported statistics of new COVID-19 cases and is publicly chastised with threats of brute force. Such negative, even violent discourse is seen as further enlarging the power wielded by the government over the public that is imagined as uncooperative, irresponsible, and needing more discipline (Hapal, 2021).

An area under granular lockdown (Image credit: Philippine News Agency)

Whether it is true that more than a million Filipinos are deliberate delinquents is highly debatable. But an even more serious question is—What happens to violators? Reports say curfew violators have been arrested, locked up in dog cages, left to suffer the intense heat of the midday sun, and threatened or actually shot dead. The severity of punishment for non-compliance raises questions of human rights—Does violating public health rules justify violation of people’s basic human rights?

At the same time, it raises an important concern on the comprehensibility of regulations because comprehension precedes compliance. In other words, is it right to punish people for not following policies, which they cannot understand in the first place?

The gap between policy and compliance

Without intending to diminish the value of civil obedience, I argue that the problem of ambiguity in pandemic regulations represents a critical gap between policy and compliance.

As Professor Lawrence Solan of Brooklyn Law School explained in the 1^st International Conference on Forensic Linguistics (organized by the University of Santo Tomas – English Department on 18 September 2021), the seemingly simple pattern of reading the law and then obeying it is actually not that simple because it is not always easy to understand what policy requires. This issue presents an argument for the localized translation of public health information.

While multilingual health information materials have been deployed in the Philippines at the beginning of the pandemic, there is less known about the multilingual translation of lockdown policies, which are largely in English, as shown in the sample explainers.

Harsh punishments for non-compliance with lockdown rules (Image credit: Human Rights Watch)

Globally, the effect of linguistic ambiguity in pandemic regulations include what Professor Richard Powell of Nihon University reported as ‘pandemic confusion’ and ‘alert fatigue.’ As also experienced in France, Australia, the US, among others, shifting and ambiguous lockdown rules are successfully engendering confusion, making compliance extra challenging globally.

But with more deliberate and glaring social injustices tied to the discourse of compliance, the current situation of the Philippines demonstrates how policy ambiguity can be (ab)used as a power tool and can reinforce inequalities (Kurnosov & Varfolomeeva, 2020), especially those related to differences in the ability to comprehend constantly changing lockdown names and guidelines.

References

Hapal, K. (2021). The Philippines’ COVID-19 response: Securitising the pandemic and disciplining the pasaway. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 40(2), 224-244. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261
Kurnosov, D., & Varfolomeeva, A. (2020). Constructing the not-so-new normal: Ambiguity and familiarity in governmental regulations of intimacies during the pandemic. Anthropology in Action, 27(2), 28. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270204
Pajaron, M. C., & Vasquez, G. N. A. (2021). Re: How effective is community quarantine in the Philippines? A quasi-experimental analysis. Message posted to http://hdl.handle.net/10419/230315

Malinche mediating between the Spanish and the Americans (Source: Lienzo de Tlaxcala, mid 16th c)

We live in an age of crisis, as humanity confronts an ever-escalating climate and environmental disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a steep decline in social and political trust. How to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters presents a set of fundamental collective action problems. Collective action can only come about through communication. That’s why language and communication need to be written into robust disaster prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Social and linguistic exclusion go hand in hand

Those who bear the brunt of disasters are often the most marginalized members of society. One aspect of their marginalization is their linguistic exclusion. Linguistic exclusion can take many forms and the most pertinent language and communication barriers relate to:

• A mismatch between the language chosen for public communication and the language repertoires of the target audience
• A mismatch between the medium chosen for public communication and the literacy levels of the target audience
• A mismatch between the channels chosen for public communication and the channels accessible to the target audience

Where these mismatches pile up, as they often do, the result is, first, that excluded groups may lose out on vital information. Second, social fragmentation and loss of trust are likely to follow. These can deepen inequalities further and may result in a vicious circle working against constructive collection action.

Crisis communication in context

Language and communication are fundamental to both the problem and the solution of crises. Students in this year’s postgraduate unit about Literacies in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University undertook research projects to gain a better understanding of language as both problem and solution in the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of their research projects was devoted to water scarcity in India. Despite receiving good rainfall, lack of access to safe drinking water has reached crisis proportions in India. The problem is human-made and linked to a poor understanding not only of water conservation but wider political processes that impinge on water allocation, contamination, and over-exploitation.

Those most affected by water scarcity are poor rural women, for whom limited access to safe water intersects with low levels of literacy. Solving their water crisis thus must be embedded in participatory communication processes – in their language, communicated orally, and part of mutual, engaged face-to-face interactions.

This video by Hida Fathima Kassim, Ingrid Ulpen, Thi Tuyet Trang Tran, and Xiwen Chen sums up the students’ findings about water communications.

If you want to learn more how water scarcity has been made on the subcontinent, I’d recommend Mohsin Hamid’s novel How to get filthy rich in rising Asia. It illuminates how water has gone from fundamental elixir of life to capitalist commodity through the rags-to-riches story of a poor village boy rising to bottled water tycoon.

Confronting crises throughout history

Ours is not the first generation confronting the destruction of our world, even if we might be the first to do so on a global scale. Disasters and crises are painfully evident to students of language and culture contact. Foundational moments in language history – for instance, the prehistoric spread of Indo-European across Eurasia, the emergence of English out of a series of invasions of the British Isles, or the dawn of English as a global language – all went hand in hand not only with the elimination of other languages but also the destruction and large-scale transformation of conquered civilizations.

How did former generations deal with such crises?

In another postgraduate unit in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University, Languages and Cultures in Contact, we sought answers to this question by exploring objects of language and culture context that bear witness to the crises precipitated by often violent language and cultural contact. One of our case study objects was chocolate.

Additionally, we traced the stories and experiences of some of the most engaged – whether voluntary or forced – linguistic and cultural mediators. One of our case studies was of the inhabitants of precolonial Sydney who had to face the disaster of British colonization. How did they deal with the havoc wreaked on their world?

We studied the example of the warrior Bennelong, who was kidnapped by the British with the perverse intention to convince him of their kindness and to teach him English. Initially forced into the role of mediator, Bennelong soon actively sought to establish kinship relationships that would bind the Australians and the British together in a set of mutual obligations.

While we do not have first-hand accounts from Bennelong and the other First Australians who had to become crisis communicators as they confronted the destruction of their world, some of their stories can be gleaned from the accounts of the conquerors, as Inga Clendinnen does in her historical ethnography Dancing with strangers:

Inga Clendinnen "Dancing with Strangers"

In this thread students @MQLinguistics read Clendinnen's historical #ethnography based on the diaries of the officers of the 1st fleet to learn about #InterculturalCommunication between British colonizers and Sydney's Indigenous people pic.twitter.com/dfm6DbHNU7

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) October 7, 2021

Women as linguistic and cultural mediators

Historical ethnography can also give us insights into the experiences of cultural mediators in the Americas. In precolonial American societies, women had long played roles as cultural mediators. Restoring peace after conflict and war was a role for which linguistically and spiritually gifted girls were trained for from a young age in some societies. The aim was that they would be able to act as interpreters and mediators by forging new kinship relationships and mutual obligations so as to minimize violence and suffering on both sides.

Some American societies tried to use this tried and tested approach to mediate inter-ethnic conflict in their encounters with the Spanish or British invaders, too. Some multilingual and multicultural women communicating at the frontline of the invasion crisis have gained ever-lasting fame and the names of Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea are still familiar today. These larger-than-life characters provide fascinating case studies in crisis communication on two levels: first, as intercultural communicators in their own right, and second, as the symbols of intercultural contact into which they were molded by later generations.

This video by Brynn Quick, Lydia Liu, and Vanessa Sanchez-Guayazan introduces these three women as misremembered linguistic interpreters and cultural ambassadors:

Preparing crisis communicators

In her book Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols, Rebecca K. Jager argues that the precolonial societies into which these women were born had processes and procedures in place to prepare for crises by identifying and training talented girls to become linguistic and cultural mediators.

Malinche, for example, received an elite rhetorical education through the medium of Nahuatl before being sent to live in a Mayan trading hub, from where she was given to the advancing Spanish. This way, she already was an experienced language learner and intercultural communicator by the time she became the interpreter, advisor, and lover of the Spanish commander, Hernán Cortés. In a sign of respect from both sides, the Spanish bestowed the honorific title Doña Marina on her, and the Americans used a honorific title in their language, Malintzin. From what we can gather from the historical record, it seems that Malinche genuinely believed that accommodation between the Americans and the Spanish might be possible, and that she was prepared to work towards bringing about a joint future.

To return to the present day, what processes and procedures do we have in place to prepare the next generation of crisis communicators? How could those processes and procedures be strengthened and improved?

21 Masters and PhD students from 9 countries attended the Hamburg International Summer School 2021 devoted to “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation”

How do train stations across Europe deal with the linguistic diversity of travelers? How does Kazakhstan educate the 140 linguistic minority group within its borders? What are China’s foreign language learning policies?

These are just a few of the questions addressed during the Hamburg International Summer School 2021 devoted to “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation”.

In cooperation with Macquarie University in Sydney and Fudan University in Shanghai, Universität Hamburg organized the Hamburg International Summer School (HISS) 2021 “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation” in July this year.

The summer school “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation” provided a unique opportunity to engage with the topic of language diversity and its social consequences. University teachers from Sydney, Shanghai, Indianapolis, Brussels, Strasbourg, and Hamburg worked with 21 students from 9 countries. Each multilingual student spoke at least 4 languages and some as many as 9.

Key topics related to societal and individual multilingualism, language development and language education in multilingual contexts, linguistic diversity in formal and informal institutional contexts, and language learning motivation in East Asia.

Unfortunately, the global Covid-19 pandemic made it impossible for us to meet in person. Therefore, the summer school ran in a virtual format and included online lectures, synchronous online classes, and regular informal meetings.

Trying to register for COVID-19 vaccination in Australia, Germany, or Serbia with limited or no proficiency in the national language?

At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic also provided the context in which to explore questions of education and social participation in linguistically diverse societies. All participants undertook group research projects devoted to the language challenges of the pandemic. Drawing on resources available in the Language on the Move COVID-19 archives, they produced videos about their findings, as in this example. Here, participants Catharina Weiss, Sun Jung Joo, and Ivana Nikolic examined official vaccination registration websites in Australia, Germany, and Serbia to see how accessible they are to residents with limited or no proficiency in English, German, or Serbian.

Their findings in a nutshell: without English, German, or Serbian, you might not be able to register for vaccination in these countries. View their full report here:

The Hamburg International Summer School 2021 devoted to “Language Diversity, Education, and Social Participation” was part of the Next Generation Network “Social participation across generations in linguistically diverse societies – risks  and chances in times of crises”.

With Sydney in lock-down again, my team mates farewelled me over Zoom

Writing en route to Manila

I am onboard Singapore Airlines as I am writing this, flying back to Manila after being farewelled via Zoom by my Language on the Move team mates after my four-year stay in Sydney. I moved to Sydney as Ms Tenedero and return as Dr Tenedero. I also moved at a time when air travel seemed not so difficult and I return during a global pandemic, which has considerably complicated travel.

At this time, NSW is in a strict lockdown limiting outdoor activities only for a few ‘essential’ reasons like exercise, buying food, and medical purposes, including getting a vaccine. This is in response to the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant. The lock-down comes after Australia had enjoyed greater freedom for most of the pandemic than the rest of the world. Not so long ago, it was cited as a “world leader in containment and management of emerging variants.” And if things in Australia seem bad, they pale in comparison to the 5,000+ new cases reported in the Philippines as of 15 July 2021.

In order to check-in in Sydney, my Philippine tracing app had to be up-to-date

The days of easy travel are gone

In this situation, travelling from Sydney to Manila is no longer as simple as book and go. It now involves complying with more, and frequently changing, travel conditions that vary from port to port. Travelling to the Philippines required me to download the national contact tracing app Traze and filling out an electronic case investigation form (e-CIF) to get a QR code to be presented upon disembarkation in Manila.

I read these requirements about a month before but completely forgot to do them before coming to airport! I had focused on completing my vaccinations, booking a hotel for my seven-day quarantine (down from ten days for those who are not vaccinated), packing four blessed years in Australia into two big boxes, and bringing required documents for leaving Australia (just the passport for non-permanent residents like me). So, it took me 10 minutes of anxious digital compliance work on my smartphone at the check-in counter to get the correct apps and codes. Thankfully, I had arranged to be at the airport two hours before my flight even so I knew there would be no long queues. Still, travelling these days requires more patience and higher literacy, especially digital literacy, to navigate the way out of one country and into another.

“Relax” was the main message on the Departures screen

The linguistic landscape has changed

After successfully checking in, I made my way to the boarding gate and was met by signs that I had not seen when I last traveled in December 2019.

These images show a more heightened control of movement. Signs explicitly restrict where people can sit and stand. QR codes constantly monitor ingress and egress. These surveillance and controls are supported by the discourse of mutual care for everyone’s protection and safety. This discourse, in turn, powerfully mobilizes people into compliance because, naturally, no one wants to be the reason for the number of cases going any higher – or have their journey end before it begins.

Yet alongside this heightened sense of accountability is a sign telling travelers to “relax.” Flight status codes (at least pre-Covid19) typically indicate that a flight is scheduled, active, redirected, landed, diverted, or cancelled. “Relax” is markedly novel because it is a directive, albeit a soft one. On the one hand, this sign could be seen as part of the language of care, a soothing word in a tense environment. On the other hand, it is also a form of policing that seeks to manage even the affect, implying some control of the individual’s inner space.

The in-flight hygiene kit

The double discourse of strict policing and mutual care is also evident onboard

Before entering the aircraft, the 20 passengers manifested on flight SQ212 were asked to take one of the hygiene kits stationed by the door. My guess is all of us had these items in our carry-ons, anyway. But the kit is also an opportunity to spell out new standards of hygiene, explicitly described at the bottom of the bag with instructions for the thoughtful use and disposal of used items.

All in all, these public signs collectively demonstrate at least two things. First, there is increased use of directives, which derive social legitimacy through a discourse of solidarity (Svennevig, 2021). This is done through the explicit linking of the necessity for control and mutual care during the pandemic. Second, international travel requires higher digital literacy and patience, a new condition that further restricts who gets to successfully cross borders these days.

My linguistic observations on the move emphasize the mutual shaping of language and social situation during the constantly evolving Covid-19 pandemic. It makes my return journey seem a bigger step than I had expected it to be.

Reference

Svennevig, J. (2021). How to do things with signs. The formulation of directives on signs in public spaces. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 165–183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.016

In the case of the Philippines, the government announced “enhanced community quarantine” in March 2020. As the strictest lockdown category, enhanced community quarantine prohibited intercity travel, the use of public transport, and non-essential activities for several months. In addition to curfews, local law enforcement and the military were deployed to establish checkpoints and enforce quarantine through disciplinary measures.

The lack of public transport in particular has greatly affected the ability of workers, including medical frontliners and other essential service providers to get to work.

It has widely been observed that the pandemic has exposed preexisting structural inequalities, including in many posts about the language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic here on Language on the Move. In the Philippines, the pandemic highlighted not only linguistic inequalities but also the lack of an appropriate public transport infrastructure and equal access to safe technologies of mobility.

Since 2014, my advocacy outside of academia has been pursuing initiatives related to inclusive mobility. As a bike commuter, I found myself taking part in communities of practice related to cycling. When the pandemic hit, cycling was my main means to undertake essential activities. The lockdown thus opened opportunities for me to document different locales and objects related to the cycling boom in the country.

In this piece, I look at several insights from my work gathered as a cycling advocate. Specifically, I argue that while the pandemic has accelerated the need for initiatives in inclusive mobility, cycling as an alternative in the Philippines opens opportunities for examining contested spaces and collective action which are mediated through language. I further argue in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for inclusive mobility is not only a struggle in the physical sense but also a communicative struggle, particularly in the hotly contested online space.

Language, Social Media, and Collective Action

The streets of Metro Manila have long been congested due to the large volume of vehicles that traverse its thoroughfares. Upon the declaration of enhanced community quarantine in early 2020, the use of bicycles became one viable option to remain mobile due to its affordability and ease of use.

However, the lack of infrastructure has led to accidents and even 19 cycling-related fatalities in the past year. As a response, social media have been used by advocacy groups and individuals to debate concerns over inclusive mobility.

An example provided comes from Twitter where the hashtag #bikelanesNOW trended at various times.

Nakaligtaan po yata ninyong bigyan ng puwang ang mga tinuturing nating #heroes na #frontliners: #healthworkers at essential workers, na mga #bikecommuters na din po ngayon. @MMDA #cycling #bikecommuting #bikelanes #bikelanesnow #protectedbikelanesnow #bikerslivesmatter #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/0v3BrmYBkA

— Mister E (@_mis_ter_e_) June 5, 2020

Translation: You seem to have forgotten to provide space for those whom he considers #heroes, our #frontliners: #healthworkers and essential workers, who are #bikecommuters now.

While the struggle for inclusive mobility stems from the need for safe spaces for cyclists, it is not without problems. For instance, incidents of gender related harassment have been reported among female cyclists during the quarantine period. In the tweet below shared by one political group, the Gabriela Women’s party invited bikers for a solidarity bicycle ride against misogyny and sexism. In the infographic embedded in the tweet, which uses a combination of Filipino and English, wordplay is deployed by combining kababaihan (womanhood) and the word bike to form the term “kabibike-ihan” referring to female cyclists.

On March 28 (Sunday), we will conquer the road and call for #SafeSpacesForAll & #ShareTheRoadWithHer by drawing the women sign on the map!

Join us as we raise our voices against misogyny and sexism! pic.twitter.com/wuTw2Wqk6r

— Gabriela Women's Party (@GabrielaWomenPL) March 20, 2021

Late in 2020, the government declared bike shops essential services. Since then, advocacy groups and bike shops have collaborated to create a primer for bike commuters. In this primer, which is written in Tagalog, information on safety measures before, during, and after bike rides are provided. Similar to grassroots movements in other countries that have promoted measures in addressing health concerns related to COVID-19, a combination of different languages and multimodal resources enhance the communication of meaning for the public. However, as of writing, the guide is limited to Tagalog and English language versions, while Cebuano and Hiligaynon are still in production. The limited number of languages where the guide appears reflects the current material challenge brought about by multilingualism.

Moving forward

Studying language in the era of globalization is primarily a study of inequality (Blommaert, 2010). As seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, the struggle for inclusive mobility is a material consequence that the public has engaged in a physical and virtual sense. That is, cyclists and advocacy groups do not only compete for asserting safe spaces for their daily travel needs but have engaged other stakeholders to consider the notion of sustainable cities as a major concern.

As the Philippines continues to struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, cycling as a viable and safe alternative has come to the forefront of continuous conversations among different sectors of society where the public can genuinely participate and act in the hope of achieving authentic transformation.

You can order free hard copies of the booklet

Have you received your COVID-19 jab yet? Are you thinking about getting vaccinated? Are you confused by all the conflicting information out there?

A new set of resources published by the Australian Academy of Science in collaboration with the Australian Government Department of Health provides clear and credible answers based on the best science.

The Science of Immunisation

The Science of Immunisation is a set of resources that explain what immunisation is and how vaccines work. The aim is to help people make good health decisions.

The resources cover the following topics:

1. What is immunisation?
2. What is in a vaccine?
3. Who benefits from vaccines?
4. Are vaccines safe?
5. What does the future hold for vaccination?

Additionally, you can look up explanations of pesky terms such as “adjuvants,” “herd immunity,” “pathogen,” and many more. Furthermore, the website also features several short videos clips – informative to watch and easy to share.

There is also linguistics in the science of immunisation

The expert working group behind the The Science of Immunisation includes some of Australia’s most prominent medical experts, as you would expect. Additionally, there were also three language and communications experts, and I am honored to have been one of them.

The working group paid careful attention to targeting all audiences in our linguistically and culturally diverse society. Therefore, questions of linguistic inclusion and communicative accessibility played an important role in the development of the resources.

In terms of language and communication, The Science of Immunisation is a practical outcome of the research about language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic that we’ve been publishing here on Language-on-the-Move.

To learn more about linguistic inclusion and communicative accessibility in healthcare communication:

• Does every Australian have an equal chance to know about COVID-19 restrictions?
• Crisis communication in multilingual Australia
• More about crisis communication in multilingual Australia

Check out all Language on the Move resources about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis.”

During the NSW school closures in 2020, Amelia Baggerman and Bonnie James undertook a TESOL practicum as part of their Applied Linguistics and TESOL degree at Macquarie University. The practicum is convened by Agnes Bodis. During the practicum, the majority of time is spent in a placement at a language teaching institution. Trainee teachers conduct observations, materials preparation, and supervised teaching practice. The unit design is underpinned by reflective teaching practice and aims to enhance the capacity of taking informed actions in teaching and engaging in the process of continuous learning.

Learn more about the Graduate Certificate of TESOL and the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University by clicking on the links.

***

Amelia Baggerman and Bonnie James

The pandemic turned out to be a learning opportunity (Image credit: Tonik, at Unsplash)

COVID lockdowns all over the world have undeniably affected the way we learn and teach. Teacher training courses have adapted various methods to continue their practices and also prepare student teachers for the changed teaching conditions (Bodis, Reed & Kharchenko, 2020; Pinar, Derin & Enisa, 2020).

The two of us had enrolled in the online stream of the Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University the year before the COVID pandemic hit and were committed to finishing it in June 2020. However, due to COVID, our practicum at the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institute was delayed until the second half of the year.

“How else would our practicum be affected?”, we wondered. Could we still use classroom techniques like pair work, and would we learn everything we needed to?

We need not have worried because completing the Graduate Certificate of TESOL during a pandemic turned out to be quite an enriching experience; perhaps even more valuable than what we were expecting.

Virtual classrooms enhanced our learning experience

Prior to COVID, there was something undeniably isolating about catching up on recorded lectures alone at home. For us, it came as a great relief to hear that our remaining classes would be on Zoom during the pandemic.

Zoom transformed the traditional lectures into small interactive sessions with our professors and fellow students which led to more memorable and in-depth learning. The rapport in the classroom was alive and dynamic, unlike in traditional lectures where professors are physically removed from the audience and mostly provide a unilateral dialogue. On Zoom, we could see our professors and fellow students face to face and interact with them in what seemed to be a more natural medium of communication.

The virtual classroom had an impact on how memorable the sessions were. Our lecturers also encouraged us to form study groups on Zoom. From these study groups and the active interactions with our professors grew colleagueship and an ongoing professional network across different cities in Australia. This ongoing support gave us the confidence that we would not continue our professional development alone upon graduation because we would have a whole community behind us for support.

An unusual practicum experience

Our practicum experience was anything but usual. We commenced our practicum near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a time of uncertainty and fear in the community, so much so that a single clearing of the throat would turn heads. One of us remembers swallowing water down the wrong hole whilst watching the mentor teacher. I hadn’t known my mentor teacher for very long and I didn’t feel we had built much of a relationship yet, so I simply tightened my muscles to force the cough down and as tears built up in my eyes, I hoped no one would notice but I thought, if they did, at least I wasn’t coughing! Tears were less of a concern than a clearing of the throat!

During the pandemic, we not only learned to practice teaching, we learned how to handle a pandemic in a learning environment for adults. Upon entry and exit of the classroom, everyone had to sanitise their hands. We had to ask everyone if they were well and if anyone showed any possible cold and flu symptom and at times advise them to get a COVID-19 test.

How do you square pair work and social distancing?

While we were both eager to try out different pair/group work activities that we had learnt about, facilitating said pair/group work turned out to be quite the challenge as social distancing had to be strictly enforced. This meant that the desks were arranged in rows with a minimum of 1.5 square metres between them. Students were allowed to swivel their chairs around to face their partner/s but were supposed to keep to their own desks. This forced us to think creatively, and I (Amelia) was relieved to discover that board games were still an option, even if it meant printing out several A3 copies so that everyone could see. Quizlet and Kahoot games were also an excellent option, as they allowed the students to engage with the material, and each other, without moving at all.

Experiencing the holistic role of teachers

During a time of political ambiguity many decisions had to be made including whether to keep adult institutions such as TAFE open or closed and for how long. It was our head teachers who stepped in to make these important, swift and unprecedented decisions in the best interests of their staff and students; something from which we have learned and will forever admire.

We were reminded of our holistic role as teachers and the significance of this. We were not there to simply teach English. We were there to assist our students in various ways to cope in English-speaking communities, jobs and then, a pandemic. We had a responsibility to ensure that our students understand their responsibilities in response to COVID-19 and the daily updates regarding the pandemic. Some students thought the situation was worse than it was, whereas others were convinced it was less serious than it was. The challenges lay in assessing the readability of the information at hand and then adapting it so that it could be understood by our students without missing important details.

Teaching is a calling

Face-to-Face teaching has returned to many universities and colleges now in Australia. The technical and pedagogical skills we and our lecturers have acquired are staying with us.

Studying and completing our teaching practicum during the pandemic certainly brought about many challenges, but it also made for a particularly enriching and memorable learning experience. Had it not been for Zoom classes, the two of us would not even have met, much less formed the friendship we have today. We discovered that, despite widespread fear in the community and amidst hand sanitisers and socially distanced desks, meaningful learning can very much still take place.

Most importantly, however, we discovered firsthand that the influence of a teacher extends far beyond the four walls of the classroom and into the community at large. This brings with it great responsibility, and great privilege.

References

Bodis, A., Reed, M., & Kharchenko, Y. (2020). Microteaching in isolation: fostering autonomy and learner engagement through VoiceThread. International Journal of TESOL Studies, 2(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.14
Ersin, P., Derin, A., & Enisa M. (2020). Boosting preservice teachers’ competence and online teaching readiness through e-practicum during the COVID-19 outbreak. International Journal of TESOL Studies, 2(2), 112-124. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.09
Piller, I. (2020). Does every Australian have an equal chance to know about COVID-19 restrictions? Language on the move (01 September 2020): https://languageonthemove.com/does-every-australian-have-an-equal-chance-to-know-about-covid-19-restrictions/
Zhou, N. (2020). Australian Universities Plan to ramp up in-person learning in early 2021, The Guardian Australia (20 January 2021) https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jan/20/australian-universities-plan-to-ramp-up-in-person-learning-in-early-2021

Bioblurbs

Amelia Baggerman has always been passionate about travelling, foreign languages and cultures; interests which dovetailed nicely into an ESOL teaching career. After some volunteer teaching in Indonesia and some private tutoring in both Germany and Colombia, she was convinced that teaching foreigners to speak English was the perfect career for her. She completed her CELTA in 2016 and then spent the next few years teaching in private ELICOS centres, before deciding that it was really something she wanted to pursue. This led her to completing a Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University in 2020 and now she has very happily settled into her new role teaching at TAFE in Sydney. She looks forward to seeing her students every day and considers it an honour to be entrusted with their education.

Bonnie James commenced her journey in teaching by being a volunteer language tutor whilst studying law at the University of Newcastle. After graduating and working in the legal field with a combined degree in Laws (Honours) / Diploma of Legal Practice and a Bachelor of Arts, she realised that law probably wasn’t the career for her. Once again, she set out to volunteer but this time she volunteered at her local TAFE in the English language department where she found inspirational mentors. This led to Bonnie achieving a 120 hour TESOL Certificate which allowed her to become an online English Foreign Language teacher for primary school students predominantly based in China. To expand her professional opportunities, she completed the Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University this year and commenced teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Bonnie is thankful for all of the wonderful mentors she had including the teachers at TAFE and professors at Macquarie University who made her dream to become an ESOL teacher possible.  linkedin.com/in/bonnie-james-3a31a41a5

Vaccination starts with registration and obtaining a date

Editor’s note: Last year, here on Language on the Move, we ran a series devoted to language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, and readers will also have seen the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis”. We closed the series in December 2020 but, well into 2021, the language challenges of the COVID-19 crisis continue to hold our attention.

The global focus has now shifted to vaccination and we resume our series with a post by Professor Judy Kalman, Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINVESTAV), Mexico, about the literacy practices associated with the COVID-19 vaccination effort. Each step of the vaccination process involved using written language, circulating multimodal representations, and extensive record keeping. In this post, Professor Kalman uses the massive global vaccination effort to illustrate how entangled literacy is in every aspect of our lives.

***

Eligible for vaccination? Get your papers ready!

Soldier and patient with documents at the vaccination center

At the beginning of February, Mexico announced it would soon begin vaccinating everyone 60 years and older against the Covid-19 virus. It was something my family and I had been waiting for, having sheltered in place under the #quedateencasa mandate for nearly a year. We received the news via radio, TV, and digital sources. The first instruction was to go online and register for our vaccinations, and an official would notify us of the time and day that we would get our shots. There was an immediate rush of seniors or their children to the official website, where we were instructed to type in our population ID number known as Clave Única de Registro de Población (CURP).

My husband and I recently got our first shot, and I could not help but notice how much the process involved reading and writing. Every step of the way, we—the 650,000 older adults that live in Mexico City—were asked to show official documents, fill out forms, and present written evidence of our identity, place of residence, and age.  Each document that we displayed involved, at some point in our lives, doing the necessary paperwork to obtain it, which in turn meant filling out forms, providing documents, and being approved. In a highly literate society like ours, official documents are passports for participating in many aspects of public life, receiving benefits, and being eligible for social goods. Without them, we are invisible and stymied in our efforts to go to school, get financing, procure housing, vote, and as in this case, receive healthcare (Trimbur 2020; Blommaert, 2008).

Mobilizing for vaccination is a massive literacy effort

Getting vaccinated involves filling out numerous forms

Here, the local authorities organized the distribution of vaccines by place of residence. Once the rollout began, local authorities announced the districts where vaccination would occur at the beginning of each week. General information regarding when and where to go was available to the public via the press, radio, TV, social media, and the official websites. They distributed us by the first letter of our last names and assigned vaccine centers according to neighborhoods. Knowledge regarding literacy practices such as alphabetical order, navigating web pages, reading dates, and following written instructions helped us identify and keep our appointment (Barton and Hamilton 1998; Street, 2014). By going online, we could download a specific location and time to arrive.

Much of our everyday paperwork practices are now digitally mediated by web pages, allowing us to fill out and send in forms with a click of a few keys. However, many of these reading and writing uses are grounded in procedures we used to fill in blanks with a pen (Kalman, 2001; Gitelman, 2014). What was missing from the second announcement was the list of documents that are necessary to be allowed into the vaccination center, but that information traveled swiftly over social media and messaging boards, illustrating how digital technologies enable information to flow almost instantaneously (Lankshear and Knobel, 2008). Vaccine centers were also located on maps to help us plan transportation and parking, exemplifying the multiple formats, modes of representation, and meaning-making devices used for planning and carrying out this public health campaign.  Reading and writing are complex practices, and rather than thinking of literacy in the singular, it is more precise to think of literacies in the plural.

Forms need to be checked and re-checked numerous times

Mobilizing all the seniors living in Mexico City is no small feat and making sure that the operation ran smoothly demands impeccable organization and communication strategies, but also requires a literate population and ways to replicate the information through mass media—TV spots, news coverage, online campaigns—and small media— the production of social messages directed at local and defined audiences via posters, flyers, local radio, hashtags and real-time communication software (Spitulnik 2002) – similar to the neighborhood lock-down notices I observed last year (Kalman, 2020).

Vaccination centers run on literacy almost as much as on vaccines

In our case, we were directed to a local Exposition Center, a facility run by the National University. We gathered our documents together: our official identification, a printout of our appointment, a copy of our registration, our CURP, and proof of residency. Five documents to get our shots, each connecting us to institutions, commercial enterprises, neighborhoods, and our life histories. In a literate world,  the point is not how many people read and write. Once written language is part of a community’s linguistic repertoire, it shapes the way communication is accomplished. Furthermore, it shifts the social hierarchies regarding who can read and write and who cannot, creating social expectations for literacy use (Blommaert, 2008). Who and how many people can read and write has varied over time, and historically the goal of universal literacy is a relatively recent idea (Graff, 1987).

To get into the center, we were asked to show our IDs and handed a numbered card that gave us our place in line.  My number was 4352. Then we were placed in groups of ten and waited until it was our turn to go into the Expo Center. People carried their papers in envelopes, plastic shopping bags, folders, and document protectors. All along the way, monitors wearing green shirts bearing the logos for the Mexico City government lined the route and directed us where to go.

Preparing the syringes is yet another literacy activity

When we entered, we encountered a massive space filled with people coded by their military uniforms, white coats, green shirts, beige vests, and dark blue sweaters. All of them were wearing identification badges with their names, institutional affiliations, and positions, more information than we could  possibly read as we hurried to the tables to take our place in the documentation station.

Official monitors sat on one side of the table and asked us to sit in front of them. Each one had a stack of forms to be filled out: the same information was handwritten on the top half and repeated on the bottom. The form’s two parts were separated by a perforated line, similar to the checkbooks and stubs, creating a copy of the document and its recorded information—one for the patient and one for the public health staff. The staff asked us to show our ID card and then copied our names from it, checked our age, and verified our address to ensure that we were in the right vaccination center, mediating how the form was filled out. Acting as scribes, they used blue ink and clear printed manuscript letters, and all of them wrote by hand (Kalman, 199, 2009). There were no computers or screens, so the information that we had registered back in February was not available or displayed. A few monitors had mobile phones with navigating capacity, but they seemed more for personal use during downtime than for work activities.

The materiality of literacy

Literacy practices keep everyone moving and in line

Once our form was filled out, we were directed to a waiting area and then accompanied by more monitors in green shirts to take our place in line in a series of folding chairs. As I scanned the room, I saw people, pens, paper, clipboards, packaging everywhere. Accomplishing literacy also includes access and availability of the material goods for reading and writing, from something to protect printed documents to handheld digital devices. Misplacing a pen or tearing a form could hinder the vaccination recording process and perhaps require rewriting forms rather than reprinting or resending a digital one (Barton and Hamilton, 2005). Actors’ participation, the materiality of reading and writing, and processes for producing literacy are bundled together in literacy practices.

There were multiple stations where nurses were filling syringes—even these had numbered scales on them to measure the precise doses.  They seemed to be writing short notes, perhaps to keep track of the vaccination lot numbers and vials. Organizers also designated areas for those adults who needed special attention. These were signaled by a monitor carrying a red flag that said Atención Prioritaria. As we waited our turn, a monitor came up to us individually and checked our forms to make sure they were correctly filled out and that the top matched the bottom.

Each vial of our vaccine provided six shots, and we were seated in groups of six to wait for our injections. Medical personnel collected our forms, and one person at the station made annotations on the top part of each one. I am assuming (but could not see) that they were recording the information on the vial. Two vaccinators worked their way down the line of three chairs, giving us our shots one by one. When they finished, they showed us the vial and lot numbers and explained what the writing on the vial said. They made a particular point of pointing to the laboratory and reading the accompanying numbers, although we were not sure what it meant. They also told us how the vaccine works and underlined the importance of continuing to use face masks and social distancing even though we had been vaccinated. One of the monitors returned the bottom part of the form and told us to be sure not to lose it, that we would need it for our next shot. She also said that the department of health would contact us as soon as it was scheduled, and this could take from 20 to 40 days.

The text on the vaccine bottle is as important as its content

We then got up and were taken to an observation area and asked to remain there to make sure nobody had a severe reaction. After about 20 minutes, someone from the medical staff told us that we could go. As we walked out the door, monitors again checked our forms one last time to ensure all of the needed information was there. They told us once again not to lose this vital piece of paper and insisted on the importance of continuing with public health measures.

Literacy is a collective effort

All over the world, people are lining up to get vaccinated. But they are also searching in their files, organizing documents, filling out forms, registering information, keeping track of forms and syringes. This massive vaccination effort illustrates how entangled our activities are with literacy and how reading and writing is a situated practice. Dominant versions of reading and writing underline their individual nature, but here we see how producing and interpreting texts and circulating knowledge are collectively organized and shared activities. And while we have become accustomed to thinking in terms of keyboards and screens, this process also reminds us of the power of pen and paper. Writing technologies coexist and are mobilized into action as our practices and purposes demand them.

References

Everyone in the waiting room is engaged in a literacy practice, even if only holding on to their paperwork

Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2005). Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction. Beyond communities of practice: Language, power and social context, 14-35.
Blommaert, J. (2008). Grassroots literacy: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. Routledge.
Gitelman, L. (2014). Paper knowledge: Toward a media history of documents. Duke University Press.
Graff, H. J. (1987). The labyrinths of literacy: Reflections on literacy past and present. Psychology Press.
Kalman, J. (1999). Writing on the Plaza. Scribes and their clients in Mexico City. NJ: Hampton Press.
Kalman, J. (2001). Everyday paperwork: Literacy practices in the daily life of unschooled and underschooled women in a semiurban community of Mexico City. Linguistics and Education, 12(4), 367-391.
Kalman, J. (2009) Literacy Partnerships: Access to Reading and Writing through Mediation en: Edited by Basu, Kaushik, Bryan, Maddox and Anna Robinson-Pant. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literacy and Development. pp. 165-178
Kalman, J. (2020). Signs of the times: Small media during Covid-19 in Mexico City. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/signs-of-the-times-small-media-during-covid-19-in-mexico-city/
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (Eds.). (2008). Digital literacies: Concepts, policies and practices (Vol. 30). Peter Lang.
Spitulnik, D. (2002). Alternative small media and communicative spaces. In G. Hydén, M. Leslie, & F. Ogundimu (Eds.), Media and democracy in Africa (pp. 177-205). London: Routledge.
Street, B. V. (2014). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. Routledge.
Trimbur, John. (2020). Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record: A Textual History of Asbestos Activism in South Africa. Channel View Publications.

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

In this final post in the series, Claire Livesey shows that children from migrant and refugee families with limited English and limited computer access have been particularly negatively affected by remote learning. She argues that preparing for the needs of vulnerable families during emergencies needs to be incorporated into disaster preparedness.

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Home-schooling during lockdown is really hard

(Image credit: Glen Carrie via Unsplash)

In mid-March this year, Australian schools began to close in response to the escalating Covid-19 pandemic. By early April, most schools had shifted to online learning, and families were faced with the new challenge of having to teach their kids at home.

For this research project, I recently asked a number of parents what it was like to home-school children during a global pandemic. Along with a few curses and tears, the majority offered the same response: “it’s hard. Really, really hard.”

It’s hard for students, separated from their peers and the comforts of routine. It’s hard for teachers, new to the joys of Zoom and having to adapt an enormous amount of material on the fly. It’s perhaps especially hard for parents and carers who suddenly find themselves thrust into the role of full-time educators.

How much harder, then, must this experience be for those whose first language is not English, now expected to help children with schoolwork delivered entirely through an unfamiliar medium? This has been the situation faced by many migrant families during the Covid-19 crisis (and the focus of a research project by the Language on the Move team for which findings are expected early in the New Year).

Home schooling information and linguistic barriers

For first-generation migrants and refugees, the challenges of home schooling are often compounded by language barriers. According to the 2016 census, the majority of Australian migrants speak a language other than English at home, and 17% of those who speak a language other than English are not proficient in English. This number is even higher for migrants entering Australia under refugee status, with nearly a third found to have low levels of spoken English.

For these families, communicating with schools about distance learning and Covid-19 can be highly problematic. When Australian schools closed in response to the virus, teachers and principals were having to relay changing government guidelines to parents on a daily basis. Official statements from the Department(s) of Education at this time contained complex, technical explanations of Covid safety protocols and changes to schooling procedures. Tasked with passing on this barrage of information, many schools sent out e-mails which were equally long, dense and often indecipherable (see also Tazin Abdullah’s research for the same problem with information overload faced by ELICOS students).

Understanding this type of communication requires a level of English literacy which is unrealistically high for many parents, and particularly so for those from non-English language backgrounds. As a result, many migrant parents have been unable to access ongoing communication from schools and government in regard to safety measures around Covid-19. This is a worrying finding during a crisis where, as Ingrid Piller has pointed out, every individual needs to have access to timely health information to ensure the safety of the community as a whole. A prediction borne out by the recent finding of the Victorian government that people born outside Australia were over-represented among Covid-19 infections by 20%.

Teaching in an unfamiliar language

Home schooling lessons present yet another linguistic hurdle for migrant families. Officially, parents in Australia were not expected to “teach” their children during lockdown home schooling, but rather to “guide, aid and facilitate” their learning. In reality, however, many of the materials being sent home by schools look very much like lesson plans, and require much more than casual supervision to implement.

Home schooling lessons have proven to be confusing and at times overwhelming for many migrant parents. Even with high levels of English proficiency, helping children with subjects such as maths can be a challenge due to the highly specific vocabulary required. For the 17% of Australian migrants who aren’t proficient in English, explaining complex concepts in an unfamiliar language poses an even greater challenge. Parents report feeling helpless at the prospect of having to decipher material at a primary or high school level, while they themselves are in the process of learning English.

(Image credit: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash)

A lack of access to previously available translation services has compounded this problem. Despite considerable efforts by many schools to provide interpreters and translated materials, lockdown restrictions have made it difficult to give families the support they need. Refugee agencies also report that they are stretched to capacity due to current demand for interpreters. Many parents from refugee backgrounds have limited literacy skills in their own languages, and access to support services is particularly important to meet the demands of home learning.

Additional home schooling challenges for migrant families

A rapid research study by the University of Tasmania found that Australian children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds are at risk of long-term disadvantage from home schooling. The report shows significant disparity in levels of access to basic schooling equipment and services, with many vulnerable families lacking the physical space and resources to support home learning.

Of particular concern is the finding that many vulnerable Australian families still lack basic access to computers and reliable internet service. This includes a large proportion of recently arrived migrant and refugee families, whose access to technology is below the national average. A number of recent media reports highlight this issue, interviewing Australian migrants with no home computers, needing to share mobile phones in order to access online schoolwork.

This has serious implications for migrant families in the current pandemic. Students and parents rely on internet access to engage with schools and services. There has been some government recognition of this ongoing problem, with a ministerial briefing paper acknowledging that: “for many Australian families online home learning is not a practical option without additional resourcing”. Additional equipment such as computers and modems have reportedly been made available by the NSW Department of education, and in April the Victorian government announced a program to subsidise NBN connections for students in need.

Better disaster preparation needed

Digital inequality is an ongoing problem in Australia, and the current pandemic has merely highlighted the fact that many vulnerable groups are being left out of this mode of communication.

For migrant and refugee families, increased access to computers only solves half the problem. Digital literacy training is also necessary for parents to be able to navigate online learning programs, with the majority of home schooling material only accessible through platforms such as Google classroom. Targeted services such as interpreters and teaching assistants need to be made available to parents on a consistent basis, with strategies in place for future lockdowns and periods of home schooling.

Individual schools and community groups have gone to enormous lengths to assist migrant families throughout the pandemic, placing considerable strain on already limited resources and personnel. Responsibility for providing these services needs to be at a government level, however, and specifically targeted at vulnerable communities.

As a matter of national disaster preparedness – given the ongoing nature of the pandemic but also considering other future crises – there is an urgent need to ensure that families of all backgrounds are able to communicate with schools, and to prepare for future home schooling events.

Now is the time to take stock of the lessons learnt from the pandemic and incorporate the needs of migrant families into everyday schooling practices.