The Erasure In Nature-related Discourses In PEP English Textbooks

What the world is greatly concerned about is the creation of a harmonious,sustainable,and ecological world.More and more scholars have begun to attach much importance to the interaction between language and ecology,which gives birth to ecolinguistics--an emerging discipline combined with ecology and linguistics.Stibbe(2015)is one of the celebrated ecolinguists holding that ecolinguistics plays the role of revealing stories represented in discourses and thus enable people to reconsider how these stories stimulate us to take action.In other words,the stories in discourses have great influence on people's ecological ideologies which will in turn influence their manners of treating the world.PEP English textbooks are compulsory study materials for lots of Chinese students playing a significant role in the cultivation and development of their ecological ideologies.The use of language in nature-related1 discourses in PEP English discourses have potential impacts on the development and cultivation of students' ecological ideologies,especially the erasure of nature in language use.These ecological ideologies formed in the process of learning textbooks will in turn influence their performance towards the natural world.As a result,this paper will apply Stibbe's erasure theory to have a discourse analysis of thirty nature-related discourses selected from PEP English textbooks from the perspective of ecolinguistics.In this paper,218 discourses are collected in total from primary,junior,and senior English textbooks,while only thirty nature-related discourses are analyzed in detail chosen from three stages,ten for each stage,according to their nature density.This paper strives to answer the following questions: 1)What are the distribution and the strategies of erasure of nature-related elements in nature-related discourses in PEP English textbooks? 2)What are ecological ideological effects of the erasure of nature-related elements in nature-related discourses in PEP English textbooks?Through the endeavor upon this study,the following conclusions and implications are obtained.People's ecological ideologies are not enough.The nature-related elements have not been paid enough attention in nature-related discourses.The distribution of nature-related discourses at three stages is not very even and scientific.With the increasing of grade,more attentions are paid to the breadth and depth of knowledge,while the nature that people have got used to is more frequently erased with different degrees through the use of linguistic devices,such as metaphor,metonymy,collectivization,etc.Besides,nature is not wholly taken into human's consciousness and seldom considered as itself.In most cases,nature-related elements are usually lack of subjectivity being regarded as symbols that carry people's wishes towards them or people's instruments hard to arouse their awareness of protecting nature,or just being put into a periphery place hard to arouse people's attention.In addition,the cultivation and development of students' ecological ideologies are not fully valued in current PEP English textbooks.Therefore,to enhance students' ecological ideologies,a continuous compilation of nature-related discourses with gradient at three stages is necessary.Each book should include nature-related topics,and with the increasing of grade,the breadth and depth of nature description should be relatively added on the premise that the nature and its subjectivity are fully considered.When compiling English textbooks,nature-related elements should be fully considered.What's more,in each nature-related discourse,more nature-related elements can be involved to make nature description richer,and further enrich people's ecological awareness.