A Discursive Analysis of Pre-Service EFL Teachers’ Views on Climate Change

Abstract

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is associated with a strong focus on the environment and climate change. Within the context of ESD studies, there is a growing line of research, which demonstrates that the issue of climate change forms an integral part of the ESD teaching and learning process. Accordingly, it is of critical importance to acquire a thorough and nuanced understanding of how pre-service teachers view the issue of climate change. In this light, the present article introduces a study that analyses how a group of Ukrainian pre-service teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) (hereinafter referred to as participants) views the issue of climate change. To that end, the participants were requested to write a reflective essay titled “My View on Climate Change before and during the War in Ukraine”. The discursive analysis of the participants’ essays focused on the following two aspects: (i) the participants’ descriptors of climate change manifested by adjectives and (ii) the participants’ emotional states associated with climate change. The results of the unpaired t-test indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the adjectives that described the participants’ views on climate change before the war in Ukraine and those of the ongoing war. It followed from the unpaired t-test that there was no statistically significant difference between the means of emotive lexica associated with climate change before and during the war. The findings and their implications to the fields of EFL and ESD, respectively, are further described in the article.