Mediating climate change rhetoric to increase lexical knowledge of students at university level

Abstract

Global observed and anticipated climatic changes nowadays, as well as global warming, are remarkable global changes that have occurred over the last years. Climate change (CC) is a worldwide inter-governmental complex problem with implications for many ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socioeconomic disciplines. The globe is currently confronting a variety of natural disasters as a result of climate change.This paper aims to focus on a different perspective of climate change, which is the one related to education, observed from a linguistics point of view. Climate change has evolved from a primarily physical phenomenon to one that is also social, political, ethical, cultural, and communicative. This paper also contributes to an improved understanding of the mediation of climate change discourse and of the role of language in this issue, related to the Albanian context. It employs an evidence-based and problem-solving method of research, composed of a series of workshops with students conducted during English classes. The conclusions of this paper revealed that the series of workshops conducted, served as a great way to enrich students’ vocabulary and prepare them for new challenges related to natural disasters