Applied Linguistics and the Sustainable Development Goals: The Case of Media Attention to Basic Human Needs and COVID-19 Meng Huat CHAUa, Chenghao ZHUa, George JACOBSb, Nimrod DELANTEc, Alfian ASMId, Lan-fen HUANGe, Serena NGa, Sharon Santhia JOHNa, Qingli GUOa aUniversity of Malaya, Malaysia; bCentre for a Responsible Future, Singapore; cJames Cook University Singapore; dUniversiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia; eRepublic of China Naval Academy, Taiwan  Address for correspondence: george.jacobs@gmail.com Abstract This paper considers potential contributions applied linguists can make towards important real-world issues which demand social engagement and action. One case in point is how applied linguists can contribute towards the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We provide an illustrative study in which we utilized computer tools to investigate media reporting as a way to promote awareness of basic human needs. The study examined the relative coverage of issues of basic human needs (particularly extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation), and of the COVID-19 outbreak, in four major newspapers from Malaysia, Singapore, the UK and the US. Findings were reported and reasons explored with insights from the literature and professionals working in the media and related sectors. The distribution of media coverage, we argue, reflects not a mere crisis of numbers but a crisis of responsibility and values. This paper, we hope, serves to highlight how applied linguists and language educators can be more socially engaged; they can make a contribution to the wider discussion concerning, among other important issues, the role and responsibility of media in shaping the public’s views and actions on issues that are at the heart of human sustainable development. Keywords: Applied linguistics, Sustainable Development Goals, media responsibility, social engagement, social action, COVID-19, hunger, clean water and sanitation 1. Applied Linguistics and Sustainable Human Development ‘There is a virus which has killed so many people for years. That virus is called “Hunger” and its vaccine is food. However, no one talks about it. You know why? Because this virus doesn’t kill the rich.’ World Wisdom, 14 April 2020 This paper considers the potential contribution applied linguists can make towards investigating issues of importance for social engagement and social action. One case in point is the role of applied linguistics in contributing towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Applied linguistics has often been conceived as a field concerned with language issues which have direct relevance to real-world problems (e.g., Brumfit 1995). In this paper, we provide a study to show how we have used language analysis tools to investigate media reporting as a way to raise awareness and potentially promote action which addresses basic human needs, such as the concern highlighted in the quotation above. A major goal of this paper is to highlight the role of applied linguistics in promoting sustainable development through language research and language education that enact social change.  This paper is organized in five sections. Sections 2 and 3 of this paper review issues of basic human needs and the influence of the media on public beliefs, attitudes and actions. Section 4 describes a study which explores the relative coverage of issues of basic human needs (particularly extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation), on the one hand, and of the COVID-19 outbreak, on the other hand, in four major newspapers from Malaysia, Singapore, the UK and the US. Finally, Section 5 discusses the implications and concludes the paper. 2. Basic Human Needs When humans were first learning to farm, around 8000 BC, a total of approximately five million people inhabited the Earth; yet, in 2023, the human population may reach eight billion (worldometer, 2020). Approximately, one hundred forty-four million people are born every year and approximately 57 million people die (Richie, 2019). Many of these 57 million may be dying unnecessarily, because despite the great progress that science has made in finding ways to provide humans with food, clean water and sanitation, many people still die from lack of these basic human needs (United Nations, 2016). For instance, undernutrition causes an estimated 3.1 million child deaths annually, that is, more than 8,000 daily (UNICEF, 2018). It is another sad reality that the overlapping factors of absence of sanitation facilities and clean water kill 100s of thousands of children before they reach the age of five (World Health Organization, 2019). The United Nations estimated that more than 50% of the world’s population does not have access to safely managed sanitation (Harvey, 2020a). Furthermore, as hand washing with soap and water is believed to be a key defence against COVID-19 and other viruses, the absence of clean water puts the poor at greater risk from viruses. UNICEF (2019) reported that globally, one in eight health care facilities is without water service and one in five has to cope without sanitation service. In response to these problems, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were formulated in 2015. The SDGs replaced the Millennium Development Goals which were initiated in 2000 (United Nations Development Program, 2020). Of particular interest for this paper are SDGs 1 (no poverty), 2 (zero hunger), 3 (good health and well-being), and 6 (clean water and sanitation). However, it seems that little is reported in the media concerning deaths caused by inadequate access to food, water and sanitation. Deaths caused by COVID-19, on the other hand, appear to be receiving far greater media attention, particularly at the time of the writing of this paper. This study sought to bring the light of research to bear to determine whether the researchers’ impression was correct and, if it was, to investigate why this imbalanced situation came to exist. 3. The Influence of the Media Before turning to the study, it might be useful to recall an oft-quoted argument by communication researchers and discourse analysts concerning the influence of media coverage on public beliefs and attitudes: The press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (Cohen, 1963, p. 13). The link between media attention and public opinions has indeed been a focus of investigations for many years. Citing Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart (2009), Kellstedt (2000), and Tukachinsky (2015), Bleich et al. (2018) pointed out how media coverage can influence people’s conceptions of their own status and place in society and affect people’s preferences as to public policies towards different groups. In other words, what the media focus on can have an important impact on media consumers’ views and actions and drive public perception, attitudes and possibly behaviour (Bleich et al., 2018; Entman, 1993; Kogen, 2014). While much of past research has focused on media bias towards certain groups of people (Baker et al., 2013; Bleich et al., 2018; Blinder & Allen, 2016; Branton & Dunaway, 2009), the study to be reported in this paper seeks to uncover the relative media attention to issues that are fundamentally important to human survival (specifically, food, clean water and sanitation) and to COVID-19. The motivation for this study began with our disappointment at the continuation of the suffering of children and others when solutions seem to be so easily achieved. For example, undernutrition continues while huge amounts of food – more than enough to feed all the world’s hungry people – are fed to farmed animals, so that these nonhuman animals can live lives far short of their natural life expectancies before being slaughtered to provide meat to those who can afford to purchase it (Smithers, 2017). We have been wondering why there is impressionistically so little attention in the media given to deaths caused by hunger and lack of clean water and sanitation, while other causes of death capture headlines. This seemingly unbalanced media coverage became particularly obvious in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the news. Using the present illustrative study, this paper seeks to contribute to the wider conversation concerning the role of media in shaping the public’s views and actions on issues that are at the heart of human sustainable development which, in turn, highlights how applied linguists can be more socially engaged and make a contribution to achieving the SDGs. 4. A Study on Relative Media Attention to Basic Human Needs and COVID-19 Our study attempted to address two questions: What is the relative balance of media attention to the problems, on one hand, of extreme scarcity of food and lack of clean water and sanitation, and on the other hand, of the COVID-19 outbreak? What are possible explanations for that (im)balance? 4.1 Method Four corpora were developed, comprising online articles from four newspapers from the period of 1 November 2019 to 31 March 2020. These newspaper articles were then examined for mentions of either extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation or of COVID-19. The second question was addressed via a literature review and by sending a draft of the current paper, along with the results of the first research question, to people in the media, in media studies, in the NGO sector and in related areas, and asking them for their responses. For the first research question, media attention was operationalized in this study by examining the number of newspaper articles with a focus on the issues: critically inadequate access to food, water, and sanitation vs COVID-19. Four corpora, representing four well-established English language newspapers in Malaysia (New Straits Times), Singapore (The Straits Times), the UK (The Guardian), and the US (The New York Times), were created in order to examine newspaper coverage of the relevant issues. To collect articles from the four newspapers, a web crawler program was developed based on the PySpider, a spider system in Python. From the four different newspaper websites as target pages, over 35,000 non-duplicate articles were collected. The articles were all from the ‘Local/National News’ section and the ‘World News’ section of the online versions of the newspapers published in the period of 1 November 2019 to 31 March 2020. All of the articles were then stored in separate folders according to the respective newspaper and time period. As can be seen from Table 1, the four corpora comprised 35,162 articles of 26.7 million words (tokens) in total, including 8,740 (24.86%) New Straits Times articles, 7,890 (22.44) Straits Times articles, 12,853 (36.56%) Guardian articles, and 5,679 (16.15%) New York Times articles. Changes of coverage over the five months were also noted. There were 6,172 (17.55%) articles in November 2019, 5,850 (16.63%) in December 2019, 6,596 (18.76%) in January 2020, 7,600 (21.61%) in February 2020, and 8,944 (25.44%) in March 2020. [INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE] With the help of the regular expressions package in Python, the newspaper articles with words and phrases associated with extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation or COVID-19 in the title or in the text were identified. It is important to note that there is no uniform method to select words related to the issues we were interested in and that there was undeniably a degree of subjectivity in generating the relevant search terms (see also Bleich et al., 2018). That said, prior to the automatic search, a close study of a random selection of the articles in the corpora was done to identify words and phrases that seemed to regularly occur in articles reporting the issues we were investigating. The resulting list of search items for the automatic identification of the relevant articles at a later stage was as follows: Extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation: under-nutrition, undernutrition, under nutrition, malnutrition, undernourished, hunger, starvation, famine, clean water, sanitation COVID-19: corona virus, coronavirus, COVID-19, COVID 19, COVID19, Wuhan virus, China virus, Chinese virus [note: the latter three terms became much less common later in the period from which the articles were collected.]. A total of 9,425 (26.80%) articles that contained these search items were identified. Next, those articles were divided into three categories: Category 1 – severe inadequacy of food, water and sanitation. Category 2 – COVID-19. Category 3 – articles containing mention of both severe shortage of food, clean water and sanitation, and COVID-19. It must also be noted that the kind of scarcity of food, water and sanitation considered in this study is the kind of extreme scarcity which for years and years has regularly led to millions of deaths, years before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19.  Because the search items especially for Categories 1 and 3 could have different meanings or interpretations in different contexts in the newspaper articles, the articles with mentions of the extreme scarcity issues in this study were further studied to improve accurate identification of the articles. For example, using the search item hunger, we found not only articles reporting on issues of scarcity of food but also articles about the Hunger Games and about a hunger strike. The latter were excluded from our analysis. Thus, all the articles in Categories 1 and 3 were cross-checked by the authors. First, the authors met by Zoom to discuss a selection of about 20 sample articles. Then, the first and third authors separately rated ten articles. Their rating matched on 100% of the articles. Next, the third author rated all the remaining articles to see if they seemed to truly belong to Categories 1 and 3. This close analysis resulted in the total number of articles to change to 9175 (26.09%). To explore Research Question 2, after the results for Research Question 1 were available, about 30 professionals in fields relevant to our research were contacted through email. They were asked to comment, however briefly, on why COVID-19 received so much more media attention than extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation. It might be important to note that at the time they were contacted (mid- to late April, 2020), COVID-19 had yet to cause as many deaths as the scarcity problems cause on a regular basis, not to mention that scarcity had been causing millions of fatality for years. The email sent to the professionals can be found in Appendix 1. 4.2 Findings and Discussion This section of the paper presents the results for the two research questions. Research Question 1 asked: What is the relative balance of media attention to the problems, on one hand, of extreme scarcity of food and lack of clean water and sanitation, and on the other hand, of the COVID-19 outbreak? Table 2 shows the results of the distribution of articles in the following three categories: Category 1 - Articles focusing on extreme scarcity of food, water and sanitation; Category 2 - Articles focusing on COVID-19; and Category 3 - Articles focusing on both the extreme scarcity of food, water and sanitation and COVID-19. [INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE] As can be seen from Table 2, of the 35,162 articles in the corpus of articles from the four online publications, 9175 articles (26.09%) were relevant to Research Question 1. Of those articles, 45 (0.49%) were judged by the researchers to fit into Category 1, 9109 articles (99.28%) were placed in Category 2, and 21 articles (0.23%) were placed in Category 3. Possible reasons for this distribution of articles into the three categories were the focus of Research Question 2. Research Question 2 asked: What are possible explanations for that (im)balance in media attention reported in the results of Research Question 1: that more than 99% of the articles on either COVID-19 or extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation referred only to COVID-19? The sources utilized in the search for explanations were: (a) scholarship in a variety of fields; and (b) scholars and others in journalism, media studies and related fields A number of areas of scholarship were drawn upon to suggest reasons for the findings for Research Question 1. First, in economics, the concept of supply and demand is well-known. However, just because people want a product or service, such as food or the construction of a sanitation system, that does not count as demand unless they are able to purchase the product or service, that is, unless they have effective demand (Devereux, 2018). People who have no difficulty exercising effective demand may not appreciate the struggles of those without the financial wherewithal to buy basic necessities. However, with COVID-19, even wealthy people, those who can afford easy access to food, clean water and sanitation are vulnerable. Each one is a potential victim. In addition to economics, psychology is a field that may offer insights as to why some causes of death draw more media attention than do others. For example, psychologists talk about the recency effect (Ebbinghaus, 1913) in which more recent phenomena attract more attention. Certainly, COVID-19, which contains the number ‘19’ due to its rise to prominence in November/December 2019, is much more recent a cause of death than are hunger, dirty water and lack of sanitation. Psychologists have also discussed a tendency for humans to feel a closer connection to people who are more similar to themselves (Seidman, 2018) or to those who experience phenomena similar to those they are experiencing or might experience. Believing we are similar to others can lead us to evaluate them more favourably and to believe that, in turn, they will also evaluate us more positively. All this might partially explain why the media expect readers to have more interest in those more similar to them or those who are experiencing similar events. Certainly, almost anyone is susceptible to COVID-19, but people able to afford the hardware, bandwidth and other items necessary to read an online newspaper seem unlikely to suffer from extreme scarcity of food, water and sanitation. Political science may also provide clues as to why some causes of death receive more media attention than others. Herman and Chomsky (2010), for example, introduced the terms ‘worthy victims’ and ‘unworthy victims’, with worthy victims deemed to be deserving of people’s attention and sympathy, whereas the deaths of unworthy victims, regardless of the reasons they die, do not merit much notice in the media. Of course, worthiness depends on who is judging. For example, Pear (2018) criticized a US government perspective by recounting that the US representative to the United Nations held up photos of Syrian children who had been killed by the armed forces of the Syrian government, a government opposed by that of the US. At the same time, Pear claimed that the US largely ignored the deaths of 50,000 Yemeni children, as these fatalities resulted in part from policies of US government ally, the government of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps, for many in the media, victims of COVID-19 may somehow be more worthy than victims of malnutrition or lack of clean water and sanitation. Writing on the issue of world hunger, Field (2002) also offered a political science perspective on the distribution of attentional resources, writing that no policymakers or commentators on policy would argue in support of hunger, and that opposing hunger lends one an aura of rectitude. However, Field noted some reasons that hunger does not receive the media space that it might otherwise seem to merit. These reasons include: Hungry people often lack visibility, living in remote areas, or when situated in urban areas, residing in locations not often frequented by the media’s paying consumers. The hungry often suffer from an absence of what Field called ‘political salience’, that is, they do not know how to make their voices heard. While almost everyone agrees that people having insufficient food and going without clean water and sanitation is a societal evil, fewer people agree that addressing this evil results in a collective good. In the field of Mass Communication, Framing Theory (Entman, 1993) suggested that how the media frame or present situations and events has an important impact on media consumers’ views and actions. Kogen (2014), for example, found that news articles in US newspapers that covered the issue of hunger in the US usually framed the problem as an important public matter, with the victims presented as being worthy of political action on their behalf, and the US government and readers being presented as having agency to reduce or end hunger in their own country. In contrast, Kogen found that articles in the same US newspapers covering hunger in Africa framed hunger there as less relevant to the US public, and focused less on the victims being viewed as worthy of assistance and of the problem being solvable: this renders readers as impotent, either to solve the problem themselves or to influence their government to solve the problem. Relevance may thus be key to reader reactions. Inclusion or exclusion of solutions-oriented information needs to be considered, since crises represent a key time during which the potential for international engagement is discussed in the mainstream media. However, Kogen (2014) found that US newspapers, when reporting on suffering in Africa tended to imply that no solutions were available or that suggested solutions were unrealistic. Kogen maintained that media coverage plays an important role by informing citizens, so that they can shape and express views on what their government and other organizations are doing. An example of media framing of an issue as one in which victims are worthy of assistance and in which readers are capable of rendering some assistance can be seen in a Singapore newspaper article (Co, 2020). In that article, readers were called on to help those in need due to the COVID-19 outbreak. This assistance effort was painted in a positive light in quoted comments by government ministers, and the effort was described by the use of purr words or positive terms (Hayakawa & Hayakawa, 1991), from Singapore culture such as ‘kampung’ (community) and ‘sayang’ (caring). Furthermore, specific guidance was given on what readers could do to assist. Further insights into media practice were gained through the feedback from those teaching media and communication studies and those working in the media industry. It must be noted though that of the approximately 30 professionals who were contacted for their insights into the findings for Research Question 1, less than one-third responded. Nonetheless, those responses aided our understanding of the issue we were investigating. Responses which added to what was learned via the literature review appear below anonymously: 1. COVID-19 captures media attention because of its novelty as an unseen, unprecedented, wide-scale phenomenon that has baffled the world’s top scientists. 2. However, as to the novelty effect bringing media attention to COVID-19, one respondent pointed out that zoonotic diseases (diseases spread between humans and other animals) go back thousands of years and may be expanding due to humans increasing encroachment on the lives of other animals (Greger, 2020; Spinney, 2020). 3. Furthermore, although warnings about upcoming pandemics from luminaries such as Bill Gates were not new, the media’s short attention span means that the media only focus on problems when those problems manifest themselves as disasters. Similar criticisms have been made regarding media attention to the climate crisis (Moore, 2009). 4. COVID-19 may have a short-term solution, such as a vaccine or a treatment, whereas extreme poverty can only be addressed via long-term solutions, and as noted above, the media have a short attention span. 5. One axiom about media coverage is, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ (i.e., it receives front-page coverage). Although the COVID-19 crisis has not produced bloody photos, there has been no shortage of striking photos (e.g., supermarket shelves emptied by panic buying, normally crowded cityscapes suddenly empty, and clear skies and waterways that were normally darkened by pollution). Such juicy stories bring online clicks and increased readership, thereby growing revenue for the media. 6. COVID-19 also gained media attention due to the racial and geopolitical elements. As the virus appears to have begun in China, Chinese people, regardless of nationality, were sometimes targeted. Furthermore, the virus became part of the rivalry between the Chinese and US governments. 7. COVID-19 brought with it other political issues, such as whether or not to lockdown and for how long to lockdown. Politicians used the media to seek support for their views on these issues. 8. As governments needed to involve the public in addressing the COVID-19 crisis, the media were key tools for informing and mobilizing the public, including in combatting fake news. Of course, the public could also be involved in addressing the overlapping crises arising from lack of food, clean water and sanitation. Indeed, the United Nations and others seek to use the media in their campaigns around the SDGs.  9. Media reflect and reinforce a common tendency among too many people to think in microscopic, fragmented units of analysis while failing to conceptualize and communicate the inter-connectedness of events and conditions. This lack of attention to inter-connectedness may explain why we saw few articles in Category 3 (i.e., articles on both COVID-19 and on fatal effects of poverty). 10. The inequitable distribution of food, clean water and sanitation across the world’s populations is too political (hot) for media to comment upon, too much for consumers of media to absorb, and seemingly insurmountable given the general lack of political and social will to do anything to even see the problem, let alone talk about strategies to fix it.   Implications and Conclusions Galtung and Ruge (1965), in a much-cited article, posited the existence of two levels of human organization: inter-personal and international. Particularly at the international level, the media have a crucial role to play in the public’s knowledge, although Galtung and Ruge also credited other sources of knowledge such as personal experience. Ward (2016) highlighted the many changes in the media since 1965 when Galtung and Ruge wrote, stating that: We live in a vastly different media ecology with new practices, new practitioners, and new values. This revolution has led to turmoil in journalism ethics. A consensus on traditional norms has collapsed, replaced by the different perspectives of legacy media, citizen journalists, advocacy networks, and social media. There is hardly a norm that is not challenged or ignored. What should these new media ethics be, as the world looks for answers in the midst of the seemingly burgeoning and overlapping crises including pandemics, global heating and the search to save millions of lives in the Global South by meeting the UN’s SDGs. Some scientists have urged that governments and other key forces in society take climate change and poverty as seriously as COVID-19 is being taken as we write in April 2020. Harvey (2020b) quoted Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, and chair of the commission of the social determinants of health at the World Health Organisation, as calling for efforts to address global heating and the consequences of poverty on the scale of those efforts being mounted to overcome COVID-19. “Coronavirus exposes that we can do things differently,” he said. “We must not go back to the status quo ante.” Expressing similar sentiments, journalist and commentator Nicholas Kristof (2020) spoke of the urgency to conquer the ‘pandemic of inequality’ that existed long before COVID-19 and will exist much longer – ‘until we deal with it’. This pandemic of inequality lies behind the crippling shortages of food, clean water and sanitation faced by billions of our fellow humans. Both epidemiologists and development experts stress the benefits of early action. For example, without adequate nutrition, young children can never grow up to reach their full potential, and the other almost eight billion people on the Earth will miss the great contributions they can make to our collective well-being. This is why the United Nations’ 17 SDGs form an overlapping package (see Leal Filho et al., 2018). In safely delivering this package, people, guided in part by the media, would do well to heed the advice of the United Nations which urged that we have to manage the unavoidable to avoid the unmanageable (Ginzburg, 2007). The glaring reality of the need for social action therefore demands attention from all disciplines. Applied linguists form a significant group of people who could make meaningful contributions towards this 'pandemic of inequality' and other concerns of importance to this world. This paper makes an attempt to contribute towards this direction by exploring how some computer tools and techniques in applied linguistics can be used to investigate relative media attention to various issues. It was observed that the four major newspapers considered in our study failed to make issues fundamental to human survival more visible to the public. This media bias, we argue, reflects not a mere crisis of numbers but more profoundly, a crisis of responsibility and values. This line of inquiry merits further serious exploration, with the argument to be buttressed by data applied linguists can collect and analyze. Similarly, Jacobs (2019), Jacobs and Chau (2020) and Phipps and Ladegaard (2020) recently call for academics and language educators to do socially engaged work. Work of this nature would include the following qualities: This work must continually seek to be inclusive of those who are seldom discussed or represented in academic studies and/or in mainstream media. This is similar to what was found in the study reported in this paper: the four newspapers showered detailed coverage of people with COVID-19, but rarely discussed marginalized populations suffering from such ongoing woes as lack of sanitation. There is a need for applied linguists to ask, identify and explore whether the people and situations we focus on are often people similar to ourselves or situations similar to those in which we often find ourselves. More examples of socially engaged work of this kind can be found in Phipps (2014) and Suppiah and Kaur (2018). This line of work can be extended to our fellow earthlings, based on the same spirit of inclusiveness and addressing wider global concerns (e.g., Chau & Jacobs, 2021). This work cannot stop with publishing in academic journals and presenting at academic conferences, although these can be worthwhile. Applied linguists need to make use of their expertise and take their findings to the public, to policymakers and to traditional and social media (e.g., Papa & Singhal, 2007). For instance, we can engage local communities in language research (e.g., Pillai, 2017; Pillai et al., 2017), develop regional capacity building activities (e.g., Hashim & Azman Firdaus, 2019), or support the United Nations’ World Food Program, winner of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize (e.g., Sharma, 2020). While maintaining academic rigor and meeting standards for scholarly work, we must also know how to make our work understandable and accessible to the general public (Illingworth & Prokop, 2017); otherwise the knowledge and insights we develop face limited opportunities to bring light to public discussions. At the same time that we seek to make our work accessible to the general public, we must not oversimplify the many complexities of reality (Burkett, 2018). For example, eliminating World Hunger may seem easy, as human agriculture already produces enough food to feed everyone on the planet. However, the issue of food distribution presents a host of complications. Applied linguists and language educators can also guide and support students to make use of applied linguistic tools and resources to add their voices to important real-world issues. For example, the study reported in this paper can, with some adjustments, easily be turned into a language teaching example or a classroom project for students to investigate media reporting as a way to promote awareness of basic human needs and other concerns. The aim is on students’ potential contribution towards social engagement through learning and utilizing tools used by applied linguists. They can be guided to formulate the goal(s) of their research and how they could go about investigating relevant questions, reporting what they have found about their research questions and discussing those findings. Finally, students are supported to add conclusions to their research report. Typically, conclusion sections would include summaries, quotations and calls to action, as well as acknowledgement of those who have provided assistance in the conduct of the research and the writing of the research report. The possibilities of engaging students in meaningful projects of this kind are endless. Turning to research implications, we suggest that future research consider replication of the present study. Replication has been suggested to be a powerful tool in research. Porte (2012) and Zwaan et al. (2018), for example, suggest that being able to repeat a study and obtain similar results plays a vital role in the credibility of science. For instance, psychology, in particular, has had the quality of findings questioned due to inability to consistently repeat the findings of their research. Another benefit of replication involves the development of research methodologies, as different researchers using varied methods in varied contexts may open scholars’ eyes to new possibilities and may raise questions about research paradigms. In addition to attempting to replicate previous studies as exactly as possible, applied linguists can also do conceptual replications, which diverge from original studies. For example, in the case of the study reported in this paper, variations to be used in possible replications include the languages, media, news topics, discussion of science, corpus analysis methods, countries involved and other SDGs (see, e.g., Bednarek, 2016; Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017; Partington, 2010; Tagg & Seargeant, 2019; Taylor, 2010). We hope this paper will encourage fellow applied linguists and language educators to join us as we look for ways to go beyond what we typically teach and research within our ivory tower comfort zones. We need to step outside our comfort zones to join ongoing efforts, as promoted and emphasized in the SDGs, to address the many challenges facing the human race, including how to achieve better lives for all on a healthy planet we share with our fellow animals. Applied linguists and language educators also need to explore how language can be a tool for justice for the billions of humans living in poverty and facing discrimination in different arenas of daily life. We appreciate that we are not alone advocating all this (see, e.g., Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020); this paper serves merely as our effort to generate even more thought, discussion and hopefully inspired action that contributes to a collective effort for a more sustainable, more just world. 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Furthermore, you can elect to be named or to be anonymous in the research report we will be writing and submitting to a journal. The research asks two questions. Research Question 1: In the period from November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020, which topic received more attention in the online editions of The New York Times, The New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), The Straits Times (Singapore), and The Guardian (London, United Kingdom). 1. Extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation 2. COVID-19 3. Both extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation, and COVID-19. It is likely to surprise no one that COVID-19 received 99% of the attention in all four of the newspapers. Research Question 2: What is the reason for this disparity? This is where we need your input. Short answers, even one word, written in point form, are fine. Thanks for considering whether to participate in the study. Please email your responses to [Fourth author]. Attached please find the current draft version of the paper.  Table 1 Corpus characteristics Newspaper Nov 2019 Dec 2019 Jan 2020 Feb 2020 Mar 2020 Overall Art Words Art Words Art Words Art Words Art Words Art Words The New Straits Times 1,467 653,558 1,638 714,840 1,851 772,564 1,667 711,903 2,117 793,955 8,740 3,646,820 The Straits Times 1,474 811,447 1,356 780,383 1,439 823,374 1,542 892,873 2,079 1,177,308 7,890 4,485,385 The Guardian 2,051 1,726,260 1,831 1,560,319 2,127 1,793,565 3,282 2,931,093 3,562 3,163,329 12,853 11,174,566 The New York Times 1,180 1,432,711 1,025 1,230,087 1,179 1,477,929 1,109 1,508,854 1,186 1,721,768 5,679 7,371,349 Totals 6,172 4,623,976 5850 4,285,629 6,596 4,867,432 7,600 6,044,723 8,944 6,856,309 35,162 26,678,120 Table 2 Distribution of relevant articles in four newspapers ` Category Total The New Straits Times The Straits Times The Guardian The New York Times Freq. %.1 %.2 Freq. %.1 %.2 Freq. %.1 %.2 Freq. %.1 %.2 Freq. %.1 %.2 Extreme scarcity of food, water and sanitation under-nutrition/ undernutrition/ under nutrition/ malnutrition/ undernourished/ (clean) water/ sanitation/ hunger/ starvation/ famine 45 0.49 0.13 8 0.29 0.09 9 0.34 0.11 19 0.71 0.15 9 0.81 0.16 COVID-19 corona virus/ coronavirus COVID-19/COVID19 Wuhan virus China/Chinese virus 9109 99.28 25.91 2762 99.71 31.60 2603 99.50 32.99 2652 98.84 20.63 1092 98.73 19.22 Issues of extreme scarcity of food, water and sanitation, and COVID-19 21 0.23 0.06 0 0 0 4 0.15 0.05 12 0.45 0.09 5 0.45 0.09 Totals 9175 100 26.09 2770 100 31.69 2616 100 33.15 2683 100 21.07 1106 100 19.67 Notes 1. Freq refers to the frequency of articles published in the local/national and world news sections of each of the four selected newspapers. 2. %1 refers to the frequency divided by the total number of relevant articles in each category, with the sum being 100%. 3. %2 refers to the frequency divided by the total number of articles (35,162). 21