Document Type : Review article
Authors
1 PhD candidate in Linguistics, Islamic Azad University, Zahedan Branch -Iran
2 Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences, Iran
3 Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of English, Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Iran
4 Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Islamic Azad University, Zahedan Branch, Iran
Abstract
Introduction: Following the announcement of Covid-19 as a pandemic. High authorities of world health systems including the Minister of Health in Iran shared their findings and achievements with public through media. The present qualitative study aimed at analyzing the news reports of the minister of Health on Covid-19 focusing on word collocation and discourse and communicative strategies.
Materials and Methods: This review study was conducted on news reports released from December 11, 2019 till January 20, 2021 (end of the third rise) on Mehr News Agency. The extracted data were chronologically ordered in 316 reports (155800). Then the frequency of the related expressions was checked. The themes were extracted in following six steps using Clark and Braun Model (2013): familiarity with data, encoding, searching the themes, reviewing the themes, introducing and naming the themes, and finally rounding out and writing the final analysis.
Results: The concepts were put in nine categories: clarifying the duties of the Health Ministry, assignment for people, uniting the public forces, hope creation, focusing on the ideological foundations, expressing virtual education methods, using metaphors, expressing international dimensions, and using emotional devices.
Conclusion: The extracted concepts show the efforts of the Iranian Corona National Headquarters to clarify the issue, attract the public cooperation and accompaniment.
Keywords
Main Subjects
- Katermina, V. & Yachenko, E. Axiology of COVID-19 as a linguistic phenomenon in English mass media discourse. Advances in Journalism and Communication, 2020;8(02): 59-67.
- AlAfnan, M. A. COVID 19-The Foreign Virus: Media Bias, Ideology and Dominance in Chinese and American Newspaper Articles. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 2020; 9(1): 56-60.
- Azizan, M., Ismail, H. H., & Qaiwer, S. N. Power and solidarity in positive Facebook postings amidst Covid-19 in Malaysia. Journal of Nusantara Studies (JONUS), 2020; 5(2): 329-364.
- Lin, L., McCloud, R. F., Bigman, C. A. & Viswanath, K. Tuning in and catching on? Examination of the relationship between pandemic communication and awareness and knowledge of MERS in the USA. Journal of Public Health, 2016; 39(2): 282-289.
- Toppenberg-Pejcic, D., Noyes, J., Allen, T., Alexander, N., Vanderford, M. & Gamhewage, G. Emergency risk communication: lessons learned from a rapid review of recent gray literature on Ebola, Zika, and yellow fever. Health Communication, 2020; 34(4): 437-455.
- Tshiswaka, D. , Whembolua, G. L. S. & Conserve, D. F. A qualitative analysis of newspaper response to the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 2017; 10(1):224-239.
- Wong, G., Liu, W., Liu, Y., Zhou, B., Bi, Y. & Gao, G. F. MERS, SARS, and Ebola: the role of super-spreaders in infectious disease. Cell Host & Microbe, 2015; 18(4):398-401.
- Chung, S. F. A Corpus-Based Study of SARS in English News Reporting in Malaysia and in the United Kingdom. International Review of Pragmatics, 2011; 3(1);270-293.
- Mondragon, N. I., Gil de Montes, L. & Valencia, J. Ebola in the public sphere: a comparison between mass media and social networks. Science Communication, 2017;39(1): 101-124.
- Chiang, W. Y. & Duann, R. F. Conceptual metaphors for SARS: ‘War’ between whom? Discourse and Society, 2017; 18: 579-602.
- Freedman, D. O. & Wilder-Smith, A. In-flight transmission of SARS-CoV-2: a review of the attack rates and available data on the efficacy of face masks. Journal of Travel Medicine, 2020;27(8):101-109
- Clarke, V., & Braun, V. Teaching thematic analysis: Overcoming challenges and developing strategies for effective learning. Psychologist, 2013; 26(2):120-123.
- Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. 19-22.
- Do, H. J., Chae-Gyun L. C., You J. K. & Choi, H-J. Analyzing Emotions in Twitter during a Crisis: A Case Study of the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Outbreak in Korea. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing (BigComp), Hong Kong, China, 2016 Jan; IEEE: Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2016
)