ECOLOGICAL LITERACY IN EFL READING MATERIALS: A CONTENT-BASED EVALUATION OF SKILLFUL READING AND WRITING

Abstract

Purpose English language textbooks can support ecological literacy even when environmental education is not their primary purpose. This study evaluates how ecological ideas are represented in the reading texts and accompanying learning prompts in Skillful Reading and Writing, a textbook used in a university Critical Reading and Writing course. It addresses the gap between the presence of environmental topics and the extent to which materials encourage ecological understanding and action. A qualitative descriptive document analysis was conducted on twenty readings distributed across ten topic units. Each reading was assessed using five criteria adapted from Rule and Atkinson’s ecological picture-book rubric, namely appreciation of nature, realistic ecological problems, positive tone, appropriate illustrations, and hope for a solution. The mean scores reported in the detailed analysis were four point zero five for appreciation of nature, four point one five for realistic ecological problems, four point nine zero for positive tone, three point five zero for appropriate illustrations, and two point zero zero for hope for a solution. The overall mean across readings was three point seven two. Six readings received the highest average score of four point four, including Fuel of the Sea and Earth’s Final Frontier. The principal weakness was the limited presentation of actionable solutions and explicit conservation-oriented learning prompts. The findings illustrate that general-purpose EFL materials can contain meaningful ecological affordances, but topic presence alone does not guarantee environmental learning. Lecturers can add critical questions, local environmental cases, and small conservation tasks to connect reading comprehension with responsible action. Rather than treating the textbook as an environmental education resource by design, this paper examines how existing language-learning content can be pedagogically reframed to strengthen ecological literacy.