This thesis investigates corporate environmental discourse by focusing on the language of corporate environmental reports. It seeks to find out more about how corporations talk about environmental problems and how they position themselves in relation to these. The theoretical underpinning draws from ecolinguistics, specifically ecocritical discourse analysis, which critically evaluates discourses on the environment. Environmental reports published by the company Toyota are analysed through corpus linguistic techniques which help to identify the salient concepts and then further scrutinize their textual environment to uncover the dominant discourse patterns. The analysis reveals that the aim of the reports is portray Toyota as a company which actively protects the environment, which confirms the PR nature of the reports. As a result, negative information or data are downplayed and the company distances itself from these by obliterating its role (through devices such as nominalisation, passive voice or intransitive verbs). Ecological problems as such are addressed rarely and serve more as a background for the company to improve its public image. If they occur in the reports, the link between the problems and human activity is not explicitly stated. The ecological problems are also discussed as...

This thesis presents the link between the environment and Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) based on ecolinguistics, which defines the inextricability of the environment and language. The specific aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the importance of an ecolinguistic approach to FLT with an ecocritical discourse analysis of textbooks use to teach French as a foreign language. Using the ecolinguistic tool The Stories We Live by, the analysis aims to assess the extent to which the textbooks stimulate environmental awareness and ecological communicative competence. The research concerns two textbooks, Totem and Saison, and investigates the representation of the stories and their polarity from the perspective of deep ecology. The results show the textbooks to exhibit a general tendency towards ambivalent content. Moreover, the presence of explicit ecological reference in the content was evaluated and revealed, by the analysis, to be under-represented in the textbooks' content. The analyses are presented as model analyses for an ecolinguistic evaluation of textbooks, which could be used by teachers seeking an ecologically conscious textbook. The thesis also seeks to encourage further research into the ecological aspect of FLT, notably in textbooks. KEYWORDS ecolinguistics, stories we live by,...