The language of crisis: spatiotemporal effects of COVID-19 pandemic dynamics on health crisis communications by political leaders

In times of crisis, communication by leaders is essential for mobilizing an effective public response. During the COVID-19 pandemic, compliance with public health guidelines has been critical for the prevention of infections and deaths. We assembled a corpus of over 1500 pandemic-related speeches, containing over 4 million words, delivered by all 50 US state governors during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed the semantic, grammatical and linguistic-complexity properties of these speeches, and examined their relationships to COVID-19 case rates over space and time. We found that as COVID-19 cases rose, governors used stricter language to issue guidance, employed greater negation to defend their actions and highlight prevailing uncertainty, and used more extreme descriptive adjectives. As cases surged to their highest levels, governors used shorter words with fewer syllables. Investigating and understanding such characteristic responses to stress is important for improving effective public communication during major health crises.

Further Reflecting on the Six-Year Primary Project of the Institute of Education, University of Ife: The Key Players

African linguistic complexity is often defined in terms of its multilingualism and a complicated colonial sociolinguistic heritage. Tis colonial heritage is seen in the prevalence of European languages, especially English and French, in the lingual Franca of sub-Saharan states. A corollary to the latter assertion is that education in Africa, south of the Sahara, is primarily Eurocentric and quite unAfrican in context. More often than not, it is disempowering rather than empowering if we go by Paulo Freire’s notion of education as being central to empowerment and poor education as the primary agent and metaphoric vehicle for modern day disempowerment, a knowledge base that does not liberate the mind or embrace the cognitive progression of the learner.1 After all, the original goal of colonial education was to train the “natives” in European languages so as to be able to communicate with and, ipso facto, serve their colonial “masters,” and help him to rule the same “natives.” The proverbial “Food for the slave” is relevant here; and as the saying goes, “it is not given to provide the slave nourishment or enhance good growth, but to provide just enough energy to keep on serving the malevolent master.” Such is the unfortunate paradigm that captures the essence of colonial education in which the lingua franca of the indigenous learner is not only backgrounded but altogether demonized in some cases. Otherwise, how else could the common warning in the typical colonial classroom “Vernacular speaking is prohibited”? The so-called “vernacular” in question is the Yoruba language!

Study on the Correlation between Linguistic Complexity and Audience Recognition in College English Speech Contests

From the perspective of linguistic complexity, this paper explores the correlation between linguistic complexity and audience recognition in college English speech contests. By adopting the corpus construction and computer visualized data analysis, this study analyzes the speech of contestants at different levels in FLTRP Cup National English peaking Contest 2019-2020, the most authoritative college English speech contest in China. The study shows that: 1) In college English speech contests, the lexical complexity of the speech is negatively correlated with the recognition degree of the audience (i.e. the final ranking of the competition or the success of the speech). 2) The syntactic complexity of the speech exists reasonable interval to ensure good audience recognition. 3) In college English speech contests, the correlation between the lexical complexity and syntactic complexity of speeches and audience recognition is similar to the correlation between the rhetoric and audience recognition in political speeches which is obtained by previous researchers in the field of political speeches. Therefore, we think this study has a certain practical value. It provides evidence of linguistic complexity for predicting the winner of college English speech contests and helping contestants prepare for the contest better.

Complexity in Instructed Heritage Language Acquisition

In this article, I reflect on the role of linguistic complexity in instructed heritage language (HL) acquisition by specifically examining morphosyntactic linguistic complexity as it relates to factors such as transparency, saliency, and communicative value. First, I critically evaluate previous proposals on linking formal HL studies to pedagogy by arguing that learning in instructed contexts is a complex task that requires research on a number of variables including linguistic complexity. Second, I summarize the lessons learned in the field of instructed second language acquisition with regard to complexity in additional language learning. Third, by reviewing an empirical study on the development of Spanish gender assignment and agreement in writing, I provide a few arguments for investigating the interplay between linguistic complexity and the prior language experience that HL learners bring into the learning environment. Informed by findings from instructed second language studies, I propose that instructed HL studies also examine how linguistic complexity is potentially interwoven with type of instruction and individual differences.

Syntactic Complexity Measures as Indices of Language Proficiency in Writing: Focus on Heritage Learners of Russian

The concept of linguistic complexity, understood broadly as a range of basic and elaborate structures available and accessible to learners as evidenced in their production of speech and writing (Ortega, 2003), has featured prominently in second language development research since the inception of the field. The field of heritage language acquisition, however, has only recently begun to engage linguistic complexity as a comprehensive lens for studying heritage language development. The current study contributes to this fledgling area of research by investigating automatically extracted measures of syntactic complexity in the written language of heritage learners of Russian at various developmental levels. The analysis of 12 measures of syntactic complexity allows us to conclude that the majority of automatically extracted indices differentiate proficiency levels of heritage speakers in the study. The study results provide important insights into the nature of heritage language development and are readily applicable for assessment and pedagogical purposes.

Predicting CEFR levels in learners of English: The use of microsystem criterial features in a machine learning approach

This paper focuses on automatically assessing language proficiency levels according to linguistic complexity in learner English. We implement a supervised learning approach as part of an automatic essay scoring system. The objective is to uncover Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) criterial features in writings by learners of English as a foreign language. Our method relies on the concept of microsystems with features related to learner-specific linguistic systems in which several forms operate paradigmatically. Results on internal data show that different microsystems help classify writings from A1 to C2 levels (82% balanced accuracy). Overall results on external data show that a combination of lexical, syntactic, cohesive and accuracy features yields the most efficient classification across several corpora (59.2% balanced accuracy).

Use of Linguistic Complexity in Writing Among Chinese EFL Learners in High-Stakes Tests: Insights From a Corpus of TOEFL iBT

In studies on second language writing, linguistic complexity exhibited by learners has long been regarded as being indicative of writing proficiency. However, there are relatively scant studies focusing on the diversity and structural elaboration of complexity in L2 production data that are extracted from high-stakes tests [such as Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS)]. Using a large-scale learner corpus collected from a TOEFL (internet-based test (iBT), this study aims to explore the extent to which the three dimensions of linguistic complexity, syntactic, lexical, and morphological complexity, are associated with human scoring in high-stakes tests. In addition, we also tend to tap into within-genre topic effects on the production of complexity measures by learners. To this end, a total of 1,002 writing samples were collected from a TOEFL11 corpus, and six automated-coding instruments were used to investigate the variations of complexity among Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The results from the correlation analysis, multiple linear regression, and independent sample t-tests indicated that there was not a linear correlation between the majority of linguistic complexity and human-rated score levels and that proficiency among Chinese EFL learners did not signal a discriminative power in their language production. In the meantime, strong within-proficiency topic effects were found on the majority of measures in the syntactic, lexical, and morphological dimensions.