The Climate Connection - Episode 10: Future perfect

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 10: Future perfect

In our final episode, we draw together some of the main themes of this series and explore how language learning and the climate crisis should not be looked at in isolation, but rather how they are related to wider social justice issues. Renowned language expert Suzanne Romaine discusses some of her recent research into language and sustainable development, and the links between the climate crisis and language death.

In our second interview, we hear from Mike Solly about how the British Council’s practices and values are developing with regards to the climate crisis, and from Mariana Roccia who focuses on topics as diverse as ecotourism, ecowriting and ecolinguistics. Our final From the Field is a ‘vox pop special’, where we find out more from our listeners all around the world about language teacher initiatives to fight the climate crisis. Our last Green Glossary looks at two more words which we haven’t had the opportunity to look at elsewhere in the series, namely ‘greenwash’ and ‘morbique’.

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:

• Download the episode below
• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts - just search for 'The Climate Connection' and subscribe, or paste the RSS feed URL below in to your podcast platform: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-climate-connection/
• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Listen on Google Podcasts
• Listen on Spotify

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

See other episodes in this series