The Challenge of Addressing Pandemic Communication in ESP: The Case of COVID-19 Posters in University Contexts

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered significant changes, configuring a new communicative dimension within the field of ESP called pandemic communication (PanCom).Its cyclical, multisemiotic, context-dependent, and wide-ranging nature often causes ambiguities and difficulties in understanding and learning.Its distinctive peculiarities are extraordinary and complex for the population in stages of socio-health crisis and a focus of intrigue and challenges for language analysts, translators, teachers, and students.This study first examines the lexical-semantic, functional, and multisemiotic complexities of pandemic communication in a corpus of posters displayed within and around several British university premises during the pandemic.Additionally, it explores its degree of receptive complexity through a survey completed by a sample of undergraduate students from Spanish universities.By focusing on the comprehension, acquisition and instruction of this communicative dimension, the results highlight key linguistic aspects of pandemic communication that could pose learning difficulties and challenges, such as polysemic meanings, multifunctionality in speech acts and politeness strategies, as well as multiple modes of meaning conveyed by visual metafunctional elements.The findings may also help the ESP community to comprehend this language dimension better and be prepared for health crises that may arise in the future.