CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION “STUDENTS OF COVID-19 ERA”

Abstract

The present paper aims to analyse the discursive construction students of COVID-19 (era), which has been broadly used as a label to refer to all the students, who were shifted to online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Following the critical discourse analysis theoretical approach, we examine the discursive planes that have built and reinforced this discursive construction. The paper focuses on three main planes that have reinforced this discourse construction: the science (s) plane, (online) media plane, and the everyday life plane. The scientific discourse on education has emphasized the detrimental effects the pandemic has had and is expected to have on learners. Moreover, traditional, online, and social media have continuously pointed to the negative impact of the pandemic on the academic performance of students. Especially social media has been using a very powerful tool to convey this kind of discursive stance, i.e., memes. The everyday life plane has also played a role in the discursive construction of students of the COVID-19 era by bringing up and building upon the real-life experiences of the learning loss that students have been facing. The paper analyses representative discursive fragments from all the above-mentioned discourse planes, to shed more light on the students of COVID-19 discursive construction, as a pathologizing label used for a whole generation of learners affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Key words: COVID-19, discourse, discursive construction, learning loss, students.