Hashtags and Environmental Literacy in the EFL Classroom

Abstract

Abstract Hashtags have become an omnipresent phenomenon in the digital age. As such, far from simply being indexing devices, they can be perceived as meaning-making practices in their own right, which are involved in shaping contemporary social discourses. This discursive potential of hashtags can, for instance, be seen in current debates about climate change on Instagram and Twitter, where environmentally themed hashtags play an important role in how individuals construct a meaningful relationship to the natural environment. The present paper takes an educational perspective on these environmental hashtags, by taking a closer look at how hashtags can be used in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom to foster learners’ environmental literacy. It will be argued that hashtags provide a particularly useful learning foundation in English language education, since they assist learners in developing vital foreign language competences in the form of a response-ability and a discourse-ability and, overall, reveal the cultural construction of knowledge about the environment.