Health Disparities and the Applied Linguist bridges theory and practice to demonstrate how applied linguists are uniquely positioned to make vital contributions towards advancing health equity in the US. As language, power, and health are deeply interconnected, learning to articulate these connections is essential to understanding persistent health disparities in linguistically minoritized communities.This book offers a nuanced portrait of the complex interactions of social and environmental factors underlying health disparities in the US, beginning with a brief introduction to key theories linking language, power, and health, and a historical overview of significant language-related healthcare legislation. Real-life examples from diverse contexts in clinics, classrooms, and communities reinforce the ways in which we can mobilize our knowledge as applied linguists and become engaged in social justice efforts in our own communities. The authors encourage critical conversations about health equity in multilingual contexts and emphasizes the urgent need for cross-disciplinary problem-solving and collaborations. The volume is a must-read for students, scholars, and practitioners in applied linguistics and language education, and anybody interested in working at the intersection of language and health.

A rich exploration of health disparities in U.S. linguistically minoritized communities – and the steps applied linguists can take to advance health equity A valuable resource for jumpstarting cross-disciplinary conversations about language, power, and health Offers ideas for service-learning projects, community-engaged research directions, and coalition-building Keywords, end-of-chapter questions and extension activities support reader engagement Afterword by Dr. Pilar Ortega, bilingual physician and founder of the National Association of Medical Spanish

Health and Risk Communication provides a critical and comprehensive overview of the core issues surrounding health and risk communication from the perspective of applied linguistics. It outlines the ways applied linguistics differs from other methods of understanding health and risk communication, assesses the benefits and limitations of the approaches used by different scholars in the field, and offers an innovative framework for consolidating past research and charting new directions. Utilizing data from clinical interactions and everyday life, this book addresses a number of crucial questions including: How are the everyday actions we take around health constructed and constrained through discourse? What is the role of texts in influencing health behaviour, and how are these texts put together and interpreted by readers? How are actions and identities around health and risk negotiated in situated social interactions, and what are the factors that influence these negotiations? How will new technologies like genetic screening influence the way we communicate about health? How does communication about health and risk help create communities and institutions and reflect and reproduce broader ideologies and patterns of power and inequality within societies? Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective is essential reading for advanced students and researchers studying and working in this area.

An interdisciplinary overview of theory, history, and leading research in the field With a joint linguistic and medical perspective, The Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare explores innovative approaches for improving clinical education, clinician-patient communication, assessment, and mass communication. Contributions by a diverse panel of experts address a wide range of key topics, including language concordance in clinical care, medical interpreting, the role of language as a social determinant of health, reaching linguistically diverse audiences during public health crises, assessing clinician language skills, and more. Organized into five parts, the Handbook covers the theory, history, and context of linguistics, language interpretation and translation, language concordance, medical language education pedagogy, and mass communication of health information with linguistically diverse populations. Throughout the text, detailed chapters present solutions and strategies with the potential to improve the health and healthcare of linguistically diverse populations worldwide. In an increasingly multilingual, global society, language has become a critical area of interest for advancing public health and healthcare. The Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare: Helps professionals integrate language-appropriate communication in healthcare settings Addresses clinician-patient communication, assessment, research, and mass public health communication Offers key theoretical insights that inform the intersection of language, public health, and healthcare Highlights how various approaches in the field of linguistics have enriched public health and healthcare practices The Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare is essential reading for undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional students of applied linguistics, health communication, and medicine. It is also an invaluable reference for language educators, clinicians, medical educators, linguists, health policy experts, and researchers.

This textbook aims to bring together many of the various linguistic strands in health communication, while maintaining an interdisciplinary focus on method and theory.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Hispanic applied linguistics, allowing students to understand the field from a variety of perspectives and offering insight into the ever-growing number of professional opportunies afforded to Spanish language program graduates. The goal of this book is to re-contextualize the notion of applied linguistics as simply the application of theoretical linguistic concepts to practical settings and to consider it as its own field that addresses language-based issues and problems in a real-world context. The book is organized into five parts: 1) perspectives on learning Spanish 2) issues and environments in Spanish teaching 3) Spanish in the professions 4) the discourses of Spanish and 5) social and political contexts for Spanish. The book’s all-inclusive coverage gives students the theoretical and sociocultural context for study in Hispanic applied linguistics while offering practical information on its application in the professional sector.

Researchers in applied linguistics have found medical and health contexts to be fertile grounds for study, from macro-levels of conceptual analyses to micro-levels of the "turn-by-turn." The rich array of health contexts include medical research itself, clinical encounters, medical education and training, caregivers and patients in everyday life – from the formal and ritualized to the ad hoc and ephemeral. This volume foregrounds the crucial role of applied linguists addressing real world problems, while simultaneously highlighting the varied ways that health can be understood as a rich site of language inquiry in its own right. Chapters cover a range of health topics including medical training, medical interaction, disability in education, health policy analysis and recommendations, multidisciplinary research teams, and medical ethics. While reporting and reflecting on their specific topics in clinical and health contexts, contributors also articulate their own hybrid identities as professional collaborators in health research, education, and policy.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication consists of forty chapters that provide a broad, comprehensive, and systematic overview of the role that linguistics plays within health communication research and its applications. The Handbook is divided into three sections: Individuals’ everyday health communication Health professionals’ communicative practices Patient-provider communication in interaction Special attention is given to cross-cutting themes, including the role of technology in health communication, narrative, and observations of authentic, naturally-occurring contexts. The chapters are written by international authorities representing a wide range of perspectives and approaches. Building on established work with cutting-edge studies on the changing health communication landscape, this volume will be an essential reference for all those involved in health communication and applied linguistics research and practice.

Drawing on--but also extending--the theories and methods of applied linguistics, this book demonstrates how scholars of language might work together and with non-language specialists to address pressing concerns and issues of our time. Chapters explore efforts to recognize the legitimacy of stigmatized language varieties in public and institutional domains, museum-based science education for linguistically diverse children, how corpus analysis might illuminate the tension between the language choices and commitments of certain leaders, the embodied and artistic forms of meaning-making that challenge norms of Whiteness, and the transformative power of translanguaging in community-based theater. In addition, the volume demonstrates ways to enhance equity in healthcare delivery for immigrant families, examines the experiences of cultural health navigators working with refugee-background families, and highlights the value of raising public awareness of language issues related to social justice. These accounts show that applied linguists stand ready to interface with other scholars, other institutions, and the public to make socially-engaged and impactful contributions to the study of language, society, education, and access. Collectively, the authors respond to an important gap in the field and take a significant step towards a more socially-just, accessible, and inclusive approach to applied linguistics.

Language Ideologies and Linguistic Identity in Heritage Language Learning addresses the ways in which discourses about language value and identities of linguistic expertise are constructed and negotiated in the Spanish heritage language (HL) classroom, and how the classroom discourse shapes, and is shaped by, the world outside of the classroom. The volume examines the sociopolitical contexts, personal histories, and communicative practices of Spanish teachers and students in two diverse geographic regions: the US states of Texas and Kansas. Adopting an integrated sociocultural approach, it considers the ways in which individuals draw from multiple linguistic resources and social practices in daily interaction and how they articulate their beliefs about language through storytelling. Rich interactional data, examples from social media, and stories of community engagement are utilized to demonstrate how Spanish heritage speakers use language creatively and proactively to legitimize and claim power in their home and community linguistic practices. This is an invaluable resource for applied linguists who seek to better understand the relationship between language, ideology, and identity and for graduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, Spanish, and HL education.