Human vis-a-vis Nature: Analytical perspective implicated in Chinese ESL textbooks

Abstract

The current study attempts to identify the environmental viewpoints embedded in the reading passages within the ESL textbooks used by senior secondary school students in the People’s Republic of China to permit the shaping of students’ ideas of human-environment relationship in the ESL classrooms to be exposed. Systemic linguistic analysis was carried out on 20 environmentally-themed continuous text blocks. The clauses in these text blocks were assessed and clustered on the basis of their ideational, interpersonal and textual meta-functions. These clusters were then interpreted through the lens of the analytic-synthetic dimension of Pepperian world hypotheses. An analytical worldview can be implied from the text blocks studied, and the world is presented as fully reducible into human and nature. The fine-grained analysis of the transitivity of the sample clauses revealed that material process clauses predominate and most of these clauses involve humans as actors and “the environment” in its abstract sense is the most common non-actor participant. Moreover, the casual-relationships portrayed in the examined textbooks are mostly as linear event sequences with one-to-one causal-effect correspondence. The analysis of the progression of the topical themes showed that “constant progression pattern” is almost non-existent in the causal-effect text blocks, which indicates the virtual absence of the portrayal of the one-to-many causal-relationships among species. The current study bears with the potential of stimulating further analyses of the environmental viewpoints hidden within the instructional materials and thus the formulation of pedagogical strategies for countering mainstream environmental discourses.