Improving students’ english skills through the curricular introduction of environmental education in the english language subject

Abstract

[eng] Environmental problems and the importance of English as an international language of discourse are increasingly visible in our world. However, not everybody seems to be aware of their significance. While the environment is evolving to its detriment, few people are getting involved in its recovery. At the same time, students have changed, but education barely has at all over many years and few teachers are involved in its innovation. Hence, experts have mentioned that environmental education (EE) has to be incorporated into all subjects, even those that are not necessarily designed with this objective. Therefore, a study will be carried out interviewing several secondary schools to figure out how each of them incorporate environmental issues into the syllabus and how they do so. This paper specializes in the subject of English, with the main objective of engaging and motivating students to acquire the language through environmental education, in order to provide a real purpose and a real use to the language outside the classroom, apart from increasing moral and ethical values in the students. For this, a didactic proposal is made in two parts. The first one consists of the adaptation of the units of a Students' Book, extrapolating them to environmental issues in order to continue dealing with the relevant linguistic aspects of the language. The second part consists of Projectbased learning, in which students are expected to work interdisciplinarily with other subjects, pursuing an environment-related final task and the mastery of English progressively through a wide range of innovative methodologies. Thus, students are expected to acquire the second language successfully with a meaningful purpose that will motivate students to be more active in their personal and educational development.