Take it or lep it!: Stories in interpreting disaster warning announcements

Abstract

Language is a tool for communication, and it serves many other purposes in Zand disasters. This study aims to investigate the challenges of mothers living in a disaster-prone area in Panabo City in interpreting disaster warning announcements as they do have unique role in securing the security and safety of their family during disaster emergency situations. The participants were only ten (10) to be utilized in a phenomenological study. This study used qualitative phenomenological research design to acquire significant insights. Further, the results of this study show that mothers experience challenges in interpreting disaster warning announcements, lack of English language exposure, difficulties in interpreting words and terminologies used in disaster announcements, and anxiety of mothers. However, this challenge for mothers were coped by applying varying strategies, gathering information from the available resources, achieving confidence in the sourced information, and situational adaptation. These generated findings may help the mothers, government and non-government organizations, and future researchers as a basis to provide solutions and recommendations on how to deal with interpreting English disaster warning announcements.