Anthropocentric and Ecocentric Discourses in Bangladesh’s EFL Textbooks: Implications for Pedagogies of Resilience

Abstract

In the Anthropocene, the epoch of profound human impact on Earth, Bangladeshi ELT textbooks are not passive tools of language learning but active carriers of eco-political ideologies. Employing an eco-linguistic framework, this study investigates the eco-political discourses within Bangladeshi secondary-level English textbooks (Grades 6-10) through critical discourse analysis technique. The findings reveal a predominant anthropocentric narrative that individualizes responsibility for environmental crises, externalizes climate change as a distant threat, and promotes an instrumentalist view of nature as a resource for human use. These discourses, it is argued, collectively foster a depoliticized and limited eco-critical literacy, emphasizing personal responsibility over systemic critique and obscuring the embedded socio-political dimensions of the ecological crisis. Conversely, marginalized counter-narratives in select texts affirm nature’s intrinsic value and promote embodied, localized knowledge. They point toward relational worldviews and community resilience, while exposing what mainstream curricula often overlook. The study reimagines English pedagogy for the Anthropocene, urging its shift from neutral transmission to a critical medium that cultivates ethical reflection, climate justice, and ecological citizenship, empowering students as active, critically literate environmental advocates. However, future study must transcend textual analysis as this study is limited to this, developing pedagogical interventions that weaponize a curriculum’s own counter-narratives to subvert its hegemonic discourses.