چكيده
At first glance, ecology and linguistics can be considered different, but despite their differences, they are completely interlinked. Ecolinguistics is the branch of linguistics that examines the role of language in relation to the environment and attempts to establish a link between them. Ecolinguistics takes into account not only the social context in language, but also the ecological context in societies. This research aims to survey the senior high school textbooks from an Ecolinguistics point of view and specifies to what extent Iranian senior high school textbooks are organized within the Ecolinguistics framework. This study not only examines the impact of Ecolinguistics on students' performance for better and easier learning but also identifies the area of students' interests in a variety of educational texts in the Ecolinguistics framework. Accordingly, this study investigates if there are any differences between Iranian senior high school textbooks and those written by a native language writer in terms of using Ecolinguistics. At first, the senior high school English textbook was examined from an Ecolinguistic view so the frequency and percentage of words, sentences, and topics related to environmental issues were chosen and measured for evaluation. Then, the chi-square was calculated. Also three widely-used international English course books were chosen and the percentage of words, sentences, and topics related to environmental issues were chosen and measured and the chi-square was calculated for each category like the last one. To identify students' topics of interest, five reading texts were chosen from topics related to environmental issues consisting of topics such as consumerist stories, stories of unlimited economic growth, advertising stories, stories of intensive farming, and stories that represent nature as a machine or a resource. Then, the survey questionnaire was used to specify what kind of texts the Iranian high school students were interested in. The results indicated that the contents of the book Vision 1 about 25%, Top notch 1 about 50%, Interchange 1 about 12.5% and American English file 30.5% were according to the topics of Ecolinguistics. With attention to these results, it can be concluded that Ecolinguistics issues have not been adequately included in Iranian high school textbooks to support educational goals for helping students to make a connection between text books topics and their real life. It can be also mentioned that the contents of textbooks can be revised from the Ecolinguistics frame- work to improve students' understanding about the mentioned contents in the books. With attention to the students' responses to the questionnaire, it can be found that Ecolinguistics can be considered not only as an essential tool in teaching English but also as a supplement that can be used by teachers for raising their awareness of environment, nature, and ecology.
