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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
DONG Juan, ZOU Jing
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.05.011
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
The integration of ecological civilization into disciplinary education has made the environmental value guidance of English textbooks a key research issue in foreign language education. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Ecolinguistics, this study conducts a transitivity analysis of nature-related ecological discourses in Chinese junior secondary English textbooks (FLTRP edition) to examine the ecological values embedded in the textbooks. The findings show that material, relational, and mental processes dominate the textbooks’ ecological discourses, featuring extensive depictions of human ecological activities, psychological responses, and entity relationships. The high frequency of animate and physical participants reflects human attention to the ecological environment and efforts toward ecological protection. Based on the analysis, this paper identifies three types of ecological values in the textbooks and proposes suggestions for making ecological ethics explicit in English teaching, providing a reference for integrating environmental education into foreign language instruction.
ecological discourse analysis, junior high school English textbooks, transitivity system, ecological values, environmental education
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