Eco-linguistics in EFL materials design

Abstract

This study investigates how South African undergraduate EFL students perceive the integration of ecolinguistics principles in their learning materials, with a focus on environmental awareness, sustainability, consumerist values, and representations of nature. Data were collected from 40 English majors at a public university through a structured questionnaire combining Likert-scale items and open-ended responses, analysed using descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis. The findings show that students perceived their materials as offering moderate ecological awareness (M = 3.18) and encouraging sustainable behaviour to a limited extent (M = 3.23), while the strongest agreement was with positive representation of nature (M = 3.30). Consumerist values were noted but not dominant (M = 2.83). Perceptions about the adequacy of ecological content were highly divided, with nearly half of participants believing that materials were lacking in ecological themes. These results highlight a tension between ecological visibility and absence in EFL resources, suggesting that current materials provide fragmented and sometimes superficial engagement with environmental issues. The study contributes to ecolinguistics and Global Englishes scholarship by showing how learners critically evaluate ideological dimensions of textbooks, underscoring the need for locally relevant, ecologically grounded, and globally oriented EFL materials that integrate sustainability with linguistic development.