From Crisis to Hope: University Students' Construction and Implications of COVID-19 Discourses in Thailand through English Essay Writing

The outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted educational institutions worldwide. This study aimed to examine how students constructed discourses about COVID-19 and related terms in their cause-and-effect essays. The sample consisted of 89 essays written by English majors at a large public university in Northern Thailand who completed the English Essay Writing course. This study employed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the main theoretical framework in which texts were analyzed by using a combination of corpus and content analyses. The findings revealed that students did not explicitly provide a definition of the term "COVID-19" in their essays at the lexical level, but the implications were inferred based on content word selection. The discourses surrounding COVID-19 were classified into four main categories: economy, health, government, and education. In addition to the main discourses, the essays highlighted the concept of global citizenship, as students expressed their opinions about the government as citizens, calling for practical actions to address the challenges faced during the pandemic. In addition to describing these challenges, the essays also reflected a discourse of hope, implying positive psychological responses to the crisis.