An Ecological Analysis of Teacher Discourse in EFL High School Classrooms

Abstract

This study, grounded in theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Ecolinguistics, analyzes the ecological discourse of high school English teachers in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms, thereby exploring the realization mechanisms of ecological educational contents in their classroom discourse. Through corpus extraction and annotation from authentic classroom teaching videos, combined with the integration of teaching moves, ecological contents, and transitivity process types, the study identifies the characteristics of teachers’ ecological discourse usage across different teaching moves and their corresponding lexicogrammatical realizations. The findings reveal that teachers’ classroom ecological discourse is predominantly concentrated in the main-body pedagogical moves, with a focus on knowledge-oriented and behaviour-related contents, a preference for action-type transitivity processes, and a lack of realizational resources for emotional engagement and interpersonal interaction. Based on these insights, the study proposes pedagogical recommendations to optimize the integration of ecological education in high school English teaching.