Linguistic analysis of green content in italian high school english textbooks: an ecolinguistic perspective

The ultimate objective of ecological education is to spread awareness regarding issues caused by damage to the ecosystem and how to protect it and endorse behaviors that play a contributing role in ecological sustainability. Nevertheless, traditional, conventional academic and educational content often falls short of tackling ecological sustainability, with minimum stress on green content. This dissertation intends to investigate green content in three Italian high school English textbooks that are representative of this genre, English File, Empower and Speakout. This dissertation is descriptive and qualitative in nature, it uses corpus-based deductive approach and content analysis by using Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistic theory, notably its three stories, metaphors, evaluation and erasure, to dig out green content in the above-mentioned textbooks. Using the categorization framework of ecological discourse analysis (EDA), the study examines how ecological themes and contents are represented in English textbooks. This research addresses two main research questions 1) The first research question investigated if there is significant relationship between observed and expected frequency of green content related to words in selected textbooks 2) second research question explored significant relationship between observed and expected frequency of green content related to sentences in selected textbooks. The findings indicated that there is no significant difference between expected and observed frequency of the green content, which means that the three textbooks have not presented enough educational content related to environmental issues, and thus the null hypothesis are rejected. The practical implications of this dissertation are grounded in Stibbe’s ecolinguistic framework and contribute to the domain of green linguistics and environmental educational discourse analysis.