No abstract

The belief that English language teaching (ELT), for its global scope, should not only focus on furnishing learners’ language skills but also on raising their awareness about critical global issues, like environmental crises, led to the ‘greening’ of ELT textbooks. However, the ecopedagogical import of the green contents in ELT textbooks has a bearing on the linguistic/discursive representation of nature and the human–nature relationship in them as it conditions the way we humans perceive and treat the natural environment. Ecolinguistics, an emerging paradigm in linguistic research, offers the premise to analyse the construction of ecology in texts. This study conducted an ecolinguistic and ecopedagogical appraisal of the environmental texts in English language textbooks used in Pakistani schools at primary level, adapting Gaard’s ecopedagogical framework for children’s texts and Halliday’s transitivity analysis model. The study found that the construction of nature and the human–nature relationship in the selected textbooks principally propagated an anthropocentric worldview, thus lacking in ecopedagogical import.

This study determines the relationship between reading mindsets and reading comprehension performance with the use of reading engagement as a mediating variable. It drew on Dweck’s (1999) mindset theory and employed a correlational research design to collect data from 567 EFL undergraduate students majoring in English in three public universities in Saudi Arabia. The data collection was conducted by distributing two questionnaires and administering a reading comprehension test. The collected data were analyzed using a two-phase structural equation modeling approach (i.e., measurement and structural models). The results indicated that there was a significant correlation between a growth reading mindset and reading engagement. Nevertheless, a significant yet negative correlation was revealed between a fixed reading mindset and reading engagement. Moreover, there was a significant and positive correlation between reading engagement and reading comprehension performance. Lastly, the findings showed that reading engagement served as a mediating variable in determining the correlation between reading mindsets and reading comprehension performance. The relevance of the current study stems from the dearth of research on reading mindsets. Also, previous studies have not focused on exploring the correlation between mindsets and performance in the EFL context. Therefore, the current study is expected to benefit EFL readers, instructors, and policymakers.

Every text has an underlying structure which has a vital contribution in making it a meaningful whole. Awareness of a text's structure therefore is significant in developing an overall sense of the text. Story grammar offers a simple and effective framework to analyze a coherent structure in narrative texts, hence is assumed to facilitate the comprehension of narratives. The research has been designed to be a descriptive study, with the objective to explain and illustrate how story grammar functions in constructing and decoding meanings in a narrative text, and, to highlight its scope in pedagogy. A short story text has been randomly selected from the short story collection in the English text book by Punjab text book board for Intermediate level. A three stepped comprehensive analysis of the sample text has been done by implementing the selected story grammar model. It has been found that story grammar helped in deriving coherent structure and meanings from the selected short story text; hence it has pedagogical implications in developing narrative comprehension.