Mainstreaming Education for Sustainable Development in English as a Foreign Language: An Analysis of the Image-Text Interplay Found in EFL Textbooks in Japanese Higher Education

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals recognize climate action, sustainability, and quality education as critical issues, with Education for Sustainable Development regarded as a central approach for promoting the attitudes and behaviours needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Education for Sustainable Development efforts at the university level include mainstreaming environmental content in all curriculum, including in requisite courses like English as a Foreign Language at Japanese universities. Although environmental topics and themes are popular content for English textbooks, there has been little research examining whether this content is being used effectively to educate university students and promote environmental behavior. This paper presents an analysis of a corpus built from sample texts with environmental themes found in English as a Foreign Language textbooks commonly used at Japanese universities, employing codification and corpus analysis techniques. The research offers a novel approach to mapping image-text interplay within a corpus using the KPV-model (Scientific Knowledge, Social Practices, and Values). The results suggest that the image-text interplay found in the corpus often do little to further the attitudes, values, and practices considered central to effective Education for Sustainable Development and there appears to be little thematic interconnectedness between topics, images, and texts. The results also suggest that textbook creators are paying little regard to the inherent aims of including environmental content, either in terms of promoting Sustainable Development Goals or promoting ESD-linked sustainability competencies. To improve the efficacy of environmental content in English as a Foreign Language curriculum the authors introduce a holistic framework for English as a Foreign Language content creators.