Pre-service language teachers’ perceptions of sustainability and its implementation in language teaching

Abstract

In both the school environment and teacher education, sustainable development is usually linked to the natural and social sciences and is rarely incorporated into language education or encouraged as part of language teacher education. As more research is needed on the practical implementation of sustainable development in language teaching and language teacher education, this study elucidates Finnish pre-service language teachers’ perceptions of sustainability dimensions (i.e. ecological, economic, social, and cultural) and their role in language teaching. We used a questionnaire comprising open-ended and Likert-scale questions to examine pre-service language teachers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards themes under all sustainability dimensions, and their feeling about their ability to integrate them into their teaching. Pre-service teachers ( n = 26) recognized the importance of the social and cultural dimensions in language teaching and felt more capable of addressing personal environmental actions than global problems in the language classroom. Some pre-service teachers produced concrete practices linking sustainability issues with language teaching, but they were mostly teacher-centred. The pre-service teachers did not link equality as tightly to the cultural and social aspects of language teaching as they did in their personal lives. These findings help in developing language teaching and teacher education programmes toward the educational sustainable development goals. Moreover, the questionnaire can be used to analyse the consideration of sustainability themes in language teaching and language teacher education.

What difference does one course make? Assessing the impact of content-based instruction on students’ sustainability literacy

“…Contentbased instruction is indeed widely recognized for its potential to enhance language learning outcomes and our findings are consistent with those of several previous studies in the field. While sustainable development is not frequently included in language education or promoted as part of teacher preparation for language learners (Maijala et al 2023), it can readily succumb to The lower number of participants in the posttest compared to pretest results from students' absence on the posttest date, withdrawal from the course or reluctance to complete the form due to survey fatigue.…”

“…Academics' attitudes and level of awareness play a key role in shaping the successful implementation of a range of pedagogical techniques for ESD goals (Crosling et al 2020). Currently, the greatest challenge is teachers' lack of knowledge of sustainability concepts and their limited experience in teaching sustainability (Maijala et al, 2023;Shah et al, 2022).…”

“…Leal Filho (2010) argues that universities cannot avoid dealing with the biggest problems that humanity is currently experiencing. Additionally, he contends that ESD is especially important in higher education since students will soon be pursuing careers in a variety of fields and will need to understand how their careers can contribute to the solution of sustainability issues.…”

“…However, despite the abundance of interest in using CBI to increase students' awareness of certain topics and concepts, there is still a lack of research in assessing the impact of CBI on sustainability literacy. There are a few case studies, several reports of individual attempts and class practices to implement CBI in EFL classes to familiarize students with sustainability concepts (Vorholt, 2018;Schneider, 2017), and the empirical studies tend to focus on assessing teachers' perspectives on teaching sustainability to their students (Shah et al, 2022;Maijala et al, 2023). Additionally, studies assessing the impact of CBI on students' sustainability literacy with an experimental research design are very rare in the literature.…”

Assessing the sustainability literacy of undergraduate students in a first-year writing course

“…This requires adequate resources, development of learning materials that address environmental, social, and economic concerns and faculty training. Faculty often lack knowledge of sustainability concepts and have limited experience in teaching sustainability [22,34,42]. To address this, faculty members should learn how to incorporate environmental, social, and economic issues into their subject matter and be encouraged to develop activities that facilitate integrated teaching [28,29,37].…”