| Since 1950 s,an increasing number of linguistic researchers have concentrated on the interaction of language and ecology.Ecolinguistics,a new linguistic branch,has emerged and developed with this social background.At present,researchers have begun to analyze ecological discourses in many types of discourses,including news and literature.The academic achievements in ecological discourse analysis are increasingly fruitful.As the carrier of knowledge and important learning material,textbooks are not only a guideline for learning activities,but exert an important impact on students’ ecological thoughts.An ecological discourse analysis on textbooks can expand the research objects of ecological discourse analysis and provide a new empirical study in Ecolinguistics.Furthermore,it provides linguistic insight for textbook analysis by integrating linguistic theories into analysis of textbooks.Therefore,this research is designed to reveal transitivity features and hidden ecological views in textbooks by taking 169 ecological texts in eight series of EFL textbooks for middle-school students stipulated by the Ministry of Education as research objects,utilizing UAM Corpus Tool and Antconc to code transitivity,and analyzing words and grammar structure with both qualitative and quantitative methods.This research tries to answer three questions:(1)What are the distribution and features of transitivity in eight series of EFL textbooks?(2)What kinds of ecological views are publicized in eight series of EFL textbooks?(3)What points should we pay attention to on ecological problems in EFL textbooks and English teaching?The study reveals that:(1)Material process,existential process,and relational process account for the highest proportions of ecological discourses,which shows that the textbooks involve a large number of descriptions on peoples’ ecology-related activities,peoples’ mental activities and features of creatures on the earth;(2)the textbooks basically convey positive ecological view of harmonious coexistence between human and nature,but the thought of anthropocentrism is delivered in some ecological discourses as well;(3)on the basis of this analysis,the author tries to propose that textbook compilers should reduce the use of negative words and obscure statements,modify the ecological discourses that deliver anthropocentrism and enlarge the use of ecological discourses that contain positive ecological view when they design ecology-related contents.Additionally,English teachers should integrate ecological education with language teaching,help students understand sentence structure and opaque ecological views through analysis of transitivity of sentences,and improve ecological awareness of students in language learning. |
