Environmental Sustainability Education in Twelve Series of Chinese University English Language Textbooks

Environmental issue is one of the public concerns pertaining to human welfare. English language education is supposed to take its part to contribute to the sustainable development. In this study, a corpus comprising 12 series of English language textbooks used in Chinese universities (48 volumes/books) was constructed to examine the extent to which the textbooks cover the content of environmental education, and how these topics are presented. The large volume dataset was explored by corpus linguistic tools and the in-depth discourse analysis and findings were reported and discussed within the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis. The results suggested that some key environmental semantic domains, such as “Green issues” (e.g., nature, environment, ecology), “Substances and materials” (e.g., pesticide, chemical, carbon dioxide), “Science and technology” (e.g., technologies, nuclear, biotechnology), “Farming & Horticulture” (e.g., farming, crop, agriculture), “Living creatures” (e.g., endangered species, animals, wildlife) were evident. Some topics within these domains such as sustainable environmentalism, energy efficiency and sufficiency were presented and discussed critically. The textbooks are expected to help learners develop knowledge, competencies and futuristic attitudes needed to meet the sustainability challenges in various contexts.