COVID-19 and recent vaccination roll-out campaigns reveal the globally significant relevance and impact of language policies. Often only very few, dominant official or national languages are utilised for health crisis communication despite existing work and research showing the need for inclusive health communication beyond such policies. Therefore, in response to the ongoing concern for effective multilingual communication policy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore culturally and linguistically responsive communication on social media in Victoria and the Northern Territory, Australia. Here, we suggest that multimodal information drawing on a broader range of semiotic resources delivered by community members has the potential to reconfigure state-level language policy and reflect regional socio-cultural situations. As such, several recommendations are made for adapting language policies including broader definitions of qualified translators and interpreters and the development of crisis-specific communication guidelines sensitive to the place of creation and its linguistic and socio-cultural demographics. Such inclusive, bottom-up approaches can inform other multilingual contexts and policies catering to highly diverse populations such as many European countries, the United States and South Africa, among others.

Phoneme awareness is an important component of primary school teachers’ diagnostic competence. Internationally, teachers’ phoneme awareness has already been extensively studied; in Germany, further research is needed in this field. Therefore, a standardised test to assess phoneme awareness was developed and administered to N = 271 advanced undergraduate students in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, Germany.The students’ explicit phoneme awareness is rather low, and, with 41 % correctly solved items, they are not optimally prepared for early literacy instruction. Orthographic interference effects are mainly responsible for this. Overall, 73 % overestimate their performance, and this effect is stronger the lower the test performance. The practical implications are discussed.

Her research interests include decoloniality, discourse studies, Spanish and Latin American studies and heritage languages. As part of her doctoral studies, Danielle examines the intersection of languaging, decoloniality and social media in Spanish as a world language education. She is trained in Spanish and Latin American studies and German and has experience lecturing and teaching communication, sociology and Indigenous studies.