Words Matter: School Leaders’ Language in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

As the coronavirus pandemic has affected all walks of life, education has not been an exemption; in fact, it is one of the most severely hit sectors. The unknown crisis created unprecedented circumstances for all participants in the education process, and school leaders have had a double job: to navigate their institutions and look after their employees. The latter is a pretty delicate taskthey have had to keep doing business and running their companies while minding the language, since physical distancing necessitated the use of electronic communication, thus making room for vagueness and many misinterpretations. For this research, ten education leaders of private language schools and public primary and secondary schools in North Macedonia were video-interviewed on everyday COVID-19-related situations from their workplace context. Discourse completion tasks were employed as a data elicitation method. Being given the open-ended, only topically specified scenarios, the respondents were asked to recreate their language reaction to situations that really happened in their newest pandemic work life, recollecting the period since 16 March 2020. The interviews were transcribed, and the leaders' language choices were analysed.The findings show that the leaders have been mindful about their words and have mostly chosen to use positive, calm, and encouraging language.