Between Awareness and Action: Ecocritical Discourse in Pakistani Secondary-Level English Textbooks

Abstract

The urgency of ecological crises in the world, such as climate change, pollution, and the loss of biodiversity, has foregrounded the importance of environmental education in the formation of ecologically responsible citizens. In ESL settings like Pakistan, English textbooks at the secondary level serve as both language teaching tools and as vehicles of environmental ideology. The present research has explored the eco-pedagogical discourse of the English textbooks of Grade 9 and 10 of the Punjab Textbook Board and has examined how ESL learners perceive the environmental content of the textbooks. The study used a mixed-methods research design and employed Ecocritical Discourse Analysis (ECDA) as a methodological framework, which is grounded in the framework of Stibbe (2021) to analyze textbook discourse in five analytical categories: lexicalization, agentively and transitivity, modality, evaluation, and framing. A structured close-ended questionnaire with 20 items on Likert-scale items was distributed among a sample of 100 secondary school students in district Bahawalpur, Punjab, Pakistan. Thematic analysis of the textbooks showed that the most common ecological content in the textbooks was related to pollution and anthropocentric themes. Eco-centric perspectives were very low in frequency. The results of the questionnaires showed that although 78 percent of students agreed that environmental content was present in their textbooks, only 40 percent of them thought that the content encouraged critical thinking among the ESL learners, and only 35 percent of them considered the content to be locally relevant to their context. Moreover, 55% of the participants said that they were motivated to take care of the environment due to their exposure to this material. All these findings indicate that despite the fact that eco-pedagogical content is available in the reviewed textbooks, it is mostly descriptive, anthropocentrically oriented, and not sufficiently based on local ecological realities, limiting the ability of learners to develop critical ecological consciousness. The research suggests a more eco-centric and contextually relevant approach to environmental content in Pakistani ESL curricula.