Faculty of Creative Industries lecturer Dr Hooi Chee Mei and her research team consisting of Master of Arts (Communication) student Chow King, Darryl, and Bachelor of Science (Honours) Actuarial Science students Tan Yee Woon and Henry Tan Tze Heng won the overall best presentation award at the 9th International Conference on Arts and Humanities (ICOAH 2022), held on 15 September 2022.

Their research paper titled “Interacting with readers through the use of Metadiscourse in COVID-19 news” aimed to examine the coverage of humanitarian response to the pandemic in Malaysian online news portals of a major language stream, which is English.

“There was a problem in humanitarian response reporting that doubled in 2021 compared to 2020, signalling the growing seriousness of livelihood and humanitarian issues facing Malaysians as lockdowns loomed in the second year of COVID-19. While reportage on programmes, causes and movements that supported livelihoods were most prominently featured, non-hard news pieces like commentaries and opinions; relevant contacts, addresses and details to get help; and articles that included educational outreach or that proposed recommendations and solutions on how to cope with COVID-19, were underrepresented. Besides, humanitarian response reporting was heavily skewed towards situations in Peninsular Malaysia. The research focused on how the readers would respond through the reporting in COVID-19 news. Most of the time, the information has been misinterpreted through the improper use of words, phrases or sentences that caused a lot of fear and anxiety among the readers. Hence, metadiscourse is used as a way to emphasise on the clarity of the news, as well as readers’ engagement to the text in order for the news to be clearly conveyed and reported,” explained Dr Hooi.

Dr Hooi said, “I am eternally grateful to my UTARRF research team for making this research a success. This research would not work out without their endless support, help and motivation to work together as one. This research started with a lot of problems and difficulties in finding participants and the direction was changed to many different angles; yet, we managed to overcome all odds to complete it when we were doubtful that this research would go this far. Therefore, I hope that this research would help the course designers to develop more relevant forms of structured guidelines for journalism course lecturers and other writing course lecturers to employ metadiscourse to be taught in the lessons to make the text more reader-friendly. To sum up, there is one thing that I learnt throughout the research which is never to give up and persevere until the very end because we would reap what we sow, and the end product is always priceless.”

ICOAH 2022 was co-hosted by the International Association for Social Science and Humanities (IASSH), Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong Kong, Concordia University, Canada and Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. The conference was organised by The International Institute of Knowledge Management (TIIKM) in collaboration with Dau Mot University, Vietnam, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, University of Algarve, Portugal, Banasthali University, India, University of Pretoria, South Africa, Asiatic Society for Social Science Research, India and UTAR, Malaysia as the Academic Partners of the Conference. ICOAH 2022 brought together artists, researchers, academics, educators, technologists, policymakers, advocates and specialists to explore the promises and dangers of technological growth and the roles of arts and humanities in technological innovation, in investigating its ethics and effects on society.