The Climate Connection - Episode 7: Natural language

Download the seventh episode, show notes and transcript from our podcast series 'The Climate Connection'.

The Climate Connection series overview

The Climate Connection is a ten-part podcast series from the British Council which explores the relationship between the climate crisis and language education.

Across the ten episodes, we’ll hear from a wide range of leading practitioners working in the sector – teachers, trainers, researchers, publishers and authors. We’ll travel from Colombia to China, Moldova to Mali, and Palestine to Poland in our quest to share what’s happening at the cutting edge of climate action in language education.

In partnership with the Oxford English Dictionary, we’ll also learn more about the origins of climate-related language, in both English and other languages. 

Episode 7: Natural language

This episode is all about how language shapes our environment and how the environment shapes our language. In exploring this topic, we talk to two renowned academics working in this field. Firstly, we talk to Arran Stibbe, who guides us through the world of ecolinguistics, looking at how language choices really do matter with regards to the environment and how they can be a powerful weapon in fighting the climate crisis. This theme is picked up in From the Field, where we hear from the innovative Living-Language-Land project, which is attempting to create a living lexicon – a word bank drawn from minority and disappearing languages in relation to land and nature.

This global approach is echoed in The Green Glossary, where climate vocabulary in languages other than English, such as flygskam (Swedish), Heißzeit (German) and lonu gan’du (Dhivevi) are discussed. In our second interview, we talk to Ros Appleby, who talks about climate refugees, rewilding pedagogy, and how she created an English language course based on her experience of swimming with sharks.

Show notes

Each episode contains downloadable show notes. These include the following:

  • Information about the interviewees and the 'From the field' section of the podcast,
  • The 'Green glossary', kindly provided by Oxford University Press, with links to definitions of key vocabulary in the Oxford English Dictionary
  • Ideas for how you could use the podcast in your teaching
  • Bonus material

How to listen or subscribe to the podcast

You can listen and subscribe to the podcast in the following ways:

This episode is produced for the British Council by Chris Sowton and Kris Dyer

See other episodes in this series

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