Abstract
Summary The language used in environmental education texts has linguistic features that affect students' comprehension of concepts and their ability to envision solutions to environmental education problems. This paper shows what 143 middle school students focused on and what they failed to focus on when reading texts about biodiversity issues and identifies linguistic features of the texts that can account for this. Since much evaluation of students' knowledge of academic subjects, including environmental education, is done through reading and writing assignments, it is important to examine how environmental education texts present issues to students and what students write after reading environmental education texts. We suggest that features of texts such as abstract nouns and lack of explicit agents impede students' full comprehension of complex issues and obscure the causes and solutions to environmental problems. We present guidelines for teachers and materials writers to make abstract concepts more accessible to middle school students.
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