Green contents in English language textbooks in Pakistan: An ecolinguistic and ecopedagogical appraisal

Abstract

The belief that English language teaching (ELT), for its global scope, should not only focus on furnishing learners’ language skills but also on raising their awareness about critical global issues, like environmental crises, led to the ‘greening’ of ELT textbooks. However, the ecopedagogical import of the green contents in ELT textbooks has a bearing on the linguistic/discursive representation of nature and the human–nature relationship in them as it conditions the way we humans perceive and treat the natural environment. Ecolinguistics, an emerging paradigm in linguistic research, offers the premise to analyse the construction of ecology in texts. This study conducted an ecolinguistic and ecopedagogical appraisal of the environmental texts in English language textbooks used in Pakistani schools at primary level, adapting Gaard’s ecopedagogical framework for children’s texts and Halliday’s transitivity analysis model. The study found that the construction of nature and the human–nature relationship in the selected textbooks principally propagated an anthropocentric worldview, thus lacking in ecopedagogical import.

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