SustainLANGin ensimmäinen kansainvälinen artikkeli julkaistu

New article release: Implementation of ESD in language education in Finland – Higher Education language teachers’ views and experiences

OPEN ACCESS in the European Journal of Applied Linguistics:  https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2025-0064 

Here is a Research Spotlight of this study reporting on Sustainable development (SD) in Higher Education (HE) language teaching:

Our recent mixed methods study reporting on survey data provided by HE language teachers (n=43) explored how often different sustainability dimensions are integrated in language courses—and what helps or hinders the integration.

Cultural sustainability was most frequently integrated (with 60 % of teachers incorporating it in their language teaching at least monthly), followed by social sustainability (with 42 % of teachers addressing it at least once a month). Language teachers often perceive these dimensions as the easiest to incorporate into their teaching. Environmental sustainability was integrated by a third of the teachers at least monthly. Economic sustainability was the least addressed, with only 19 % incorporating it in their language teaching at least monthly.

While cultural and social sustainability were seen to be central components of language education, our results suggest that the integration of SD topics is often context-dependent (economic sustainability in business courses, ecological sustainability in engineering courses). Thus, disciplinary traditions may function as structural barriers that shape which sustainability dimensions teachers feel expected to address.

Although a majority of teachers were motivated to teach SD, only a third reported high self-efficacy in doing so. A clear need for teacher training was identified. Time, training, and materials were identified as the main practical barriers to SD integration. Balancing SD content with language learning objectives, maintaining up-to-date SD knowledge and students’ limited language proficiency were identified as further challenges of incorporating SD topics into language teaching.

Our findings propose that teachers who perceive greater institutional support are more motivated to teach SD topics, consequently we need to invest in adequate support, collaboration, and materials to balance and enhance SD integration in language education.