Appraisal, Environmental Education and Environmental Literacy

This paper outlines and uses Appraisal (Martin & White, 2007), a linguistic framework for evaluative language, to analyse a newspaper article that represents Australian school students as being terrified by climate change lessons. The analysis focuses on how lexico-grammatical features associated with the Attitude system of the Appraisal framework are used within the newspaper article to position the reader to condemn the government's support for the teaching of climate change science in Australian schools. It is further argued that the use of linguistic analysis, such as Appraisal, offers a powerful contribution to critical environmental literacy, by allowing learners to discern and respond to the ways in which texts construct and position individuals, social groups and environmental issues.