Environment and Language: how language education can contribute to the environmental debate

Abstract

This dissertation will investigate the role of language education, in particular foreign and second language education, in the current environmental debate. Undoubtedly, the environmental crisis that we are living is bound to get worse in the very near future and the recent field of ‘environmental humanities’ has urged to confront it with an interdisciplinary approach where both social and natural sciences can provide effective solutions. Within this framework, a particular branch of linguistics, called ecolinguistics, started studying the relationship between language and environment by adopting different approaches and perspectives. Indeed, language is strictly intertwined with our cognitive, socio-cultural and physical reality and its contribution to the green problems can be meaningful but also manifold. Language education seems the perfect platform where the theoretical framework of ecolinguistics can be put into practice. For this reason, this dissertation will examine and gather the main aspects that can foster environmental awareness and the protection of the natural environment in a foreign language class, through a literature review of the latest works. In particular, the first chapter will analyse the relationship between discourse and environment and how this can be used while teaching a language; the second will describe the ecological approach to language learning while the third will analyse how to implement environmental education in language curriculums. Finally, the last chapter will study how language education can help to preserve the world’s biocultural diversity.