Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, illness and wellbeing. Understanding the cultural representation of health and illness of particular communities becomes urgent especially when the community concerned is underserved in healthcare. In this project, we sought to examine the representations of health and illness by members of the Semai indigenous community through the use of metaphor analysis, a qualitative method in applied linguistics that attend to how people use language in real-world discourses to understand their conceptualisations of abstract ideas and emotions. From semi-structured interviews with the indigenous Semai people in a village in Malaysia, metaphors of health and illness were identified from the oral stories told by participants. Metaphors were identified and analysed following Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) conceptual metaphor theory that explains how people understand one idea in a conceptual domain through accessing resources in another conceptual domain. The results show that universal metaphors are dominant in representing embodied experiences while culturally influenced metaphors are important as vehicles of expression derived from their environment and folk beliefs. We argue that while culturally influenced metaphors may mark the participants as strange in their ways of thinking, a closer look at their underlying frameworks finds that they connect with universal bases that are intrinsic to all human experience. Understanding conceptual metaphors can contribute to the expansion of the locus of shared understanding between healthcare providers and the communities they serve.Keywords: representations of health and illness; metaphor analysis; Semai indigenous communities; metaphors of health and illness; health communication; culture and health

The unexpectedly disruptive period is currently being reinforced with improved ideas and approaches to meet the needs of the pupils. With pandemic tiredness and digital exhaustion being highlighted, a better understanding of students' learning preferences must be updated regularly during unprecedented times. This mixed-method study seeks to identify and explore students’ preferences based on their remote learning experiences in a public university in Malaysia. An online survey was used to gather the data for the analysis to identify the students’ preferences over the platform used, assessment types, and schedule preferences. In addition, the students’ suggestions were gathered to get more insights from their perspectives. The results revealed students preferred Google Meet, WhatsApp Messenger, and Google Classroom as the medium for delivery. On the other hand, the students favoured shorter time spent and early time slots for online class scheduling. They also preferred quizzes as the most preferred type of assessment. Lastly, students suggested considering various factors to conduct successful remote learning namely empathy from the lecturer, student engagement, students’ readiness, students’ accessibility, content delivery, flexibility, and motivation. Conclusively, the implication of this study will contribute to the body of the literature on remote learning during a pandemic. Moreover, educators in tertiary education could utilise the students’ preferences as feedback to enhance their teaching and learning delivery during remote learning. This study was limited by the absence of lecturers’ preferences and suggestions. Future studies that investigate other perspectives could create a common ground between educators and learners.

Social status has long been a point of reference in addressing the individual. As observed in the Kenyah Long Wat community, members of a family are given epithets upon life events such as birth and death to signify their new status. Although the creation and use of epithets in indexing life events may be customary in many communities, the types and variety of linguistic forms used in different speech communities may well provide a lens through which the social practices of an indigenous community can be appreciated. This article describes the epithets found in the Kenyah Long Wat language, which will ground further sociolinguistic study of the language. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with speakers of the language to obtain information on epithets and the socio-cultural events, beliefs and linguistic resources that surround the creation and conferment of epithets.