Students' Emotional Perceptions and Attitudes Toward English Teacher Feedback in Cloud Classroom Learning Environments During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cloud classrooms are catching increasing attention in English teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Via multiple correlation analysis, path analysis, and data collected from randomly selected 230 participants, this study examined the effects of students' emotional perceptions and attitudes towards teaching feedback in cloud classroom learning environments. It was concluded that all emotional perceptions were significantly and positively correlated, and learning motivation caused the most significant effect, followed by interest. Learning motivation could predict the perceived teaching feedback. Students with strong self-confidence had strong learning motivation and interest in English learning. High-score students preferred more profound and euphemistic comments;medium-score students hoped to catch more attention and obtain positive feedback from teachers;poor-score students favored direct and explicit evaluations. This study is helpful to future research into non-verbal and peer feedback in technology-based learning environments.

Kazuo Ishiguro and the Service Economy

In her article, "Kazuo Ishiguro and the Service Economy,” Kate Montague argues that Kazuo Ishiguro's novels enact a poetics of work for the present moment—not just at the level of narrative but also in the kind of language used to describe the service economies his characters are doomed to inhabit. In his best-known novels, a clinical, bureaucratic, and even glorifying lexicon of "donations,” "completions,” "substitutions,” and "lifting” is betrayed by the reality of work grounded in horror. In Ishiguro's worlds, which are very much our own, the out-sourcing of reproductive and domestic labor is enabled by a larger system in which state technologies as well as linguistic forms mark certain bodies as readily exploitable and disposable. Looking comparatively between dystopian literary form and recent critical work on the service and care industries, the article shows how the tension between a euphemistic language of service and a social logic of mass death speaks to our own moment and to a crisis of care that, after years of austerity and now a global pandemic, defines the present.

Making the pandemic normal: How 'endemic' became a euphemism

In 2019 a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, spread around the world and a global pandemic was declared early in 2020. Currently, the pandemic has still not been brought under control. Over time, many new words have seeped into ordinary language and old words have changed their meanings. In this article, I trace the semantic development of the word 'endemic' which spread from science discourse into political discourse and then into public discourse and became a euphemism. People are told that they should now 'live with' the pandemic, a pandemic that is no longer dangerous, because it has turned endemic. This euphemistic use of 'endemic' has serious consequences for pandemic management and disease control, not only in countries like the UK, where the word has, indeed, become 'endemic', but around the world, as the word has the social function of concealing the circulation of the virus and normalising the spread of infection, even death.

L'urgence de se faire entendre

Nous écrivons ces lignes alors que le contexte épidémique national pèse, devant la perspective d’un troisième confinement pour contrer l’arrivée des variants du SARS-CoV2. Les hôpitaux sont toujours « en tension », euphémisme d’une novlangue administrative pour désigner le manque de lits et de personnels hospitaliers qualifiés pour répondre à la crise sanitaire que nous redoutions tant.Le Collectif inter-urgences (CIU) est la réunion d’acteurs de terrain jusque-là inaudibles et dédaignés qui se sont structurés pour montrer combien notre système de santé hospitalier est défaillant. Notre mouvement a permis quelques avancées et d’ouvrir le débat sur le monde hospitalier.L’événement fondateur de la création du Collectif inter-urgences est l’appel en mars 2019 de personnels soignants d’un hôpital parisien à se mobiliser à la suite d’une série d’agressions ayant eu lieu au mois de janvier, dont celle d’une soignante qui a eu la mâchoire cassée. Les premières réunions réunissent des aides-soignant·e·s et infirmier·ère·s, majoritairement non-syndiqué·e·s, exerçant dans différents établissements de l’AP-HP. Si des médecins peuvent y assister, les décisions sont prises par les paramédicaux. Ces débats montrent un fort sentiment d’insécurité pour les agents hospitaliers. Le constat étayé est partagé par l’ensemble des acteurs quel que soit le site d’exercice. Les problématiques sont multiples : saturation de la capacité d’accueil des patient·e·s (hospitalisations brancards), mise en danger des patient·e·s et des soignant·e·s, harcèlement moral de la ligne hiérarchique soignante et administrative (injonctions paradoxales à la performance, pas de formation d’intégration convenable lors de la prise de poste à l’hôpital, refus de congés, injonction au respect du devoir de réserve, ostracisation lors de l’expression libre des conditions d’accueil dégradées des patient·e·s…)…

The Dynamics of Language: A Linguistic Analysis of the Framing of COVID-19 in Eswatini

COVID-19 has drastically disrupted the lives of many people globally, and the havoc it has wreaked has shattered world economies. The effects of COVID-19 in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) are threatening the very foundations of the country. Referenced in the national language, its effects manifest in the perceptions and experiences shared among Swazis (emaSwati) about the scourge. This article investigates the pandemic's impact on Swati (siSwati) and the ways in which Swazis adapted their language-related tropes in the face of unprecedented social and economic disruptions. Data are drawn from government briefings, news bulletins, media interviews and addresses. The findings demonstrate that COVID-19 has produced neologisms and expressions that index Swazis cultural views. While a morpho-syntactic analysis of the neologisms demonstrates that they derive from varied word-building mechanisms and exhibit COVID-19's distinctive characteristics of transmissibility, pathology, and annihilation, the measures to contain COVID-19 are presented aesthetically to dispel the anxiety associated with the pandemic.