Teaching Sustainability: Grammar for Sustainability

Language teachers and curriculum designers need concrete classroom methods to teach sustainability through grammar, and the primary keyword for this post is grammar for sustainability. According to the PLOS One study by Lasekan et al. (published August 11, 2026), African leaders’ UNGA-2025 English speeches form a 50, 644-token corpus from 21 countries that reveals systematic links between grammatical forms and UNESCO sustainability competencies. This post explains how that corpus evidence supports a five-phase Grammar-for-Sustainability Instructional Cycle (GSIC) and how AI-enabled qualitative research tools can scale corpus preparation, concordance analysis, and classroom task design.

Key Takeaways

According to the PLOS One article, a 50, 644-token corpus of 21 African leaders’ UNGA-2025 English speeches (published August 11, 2026) shows that sustainability meaning is built primarily through vocabulary and discourse organization, not only grammar. According to the PLOS One article, the study reports lexical resources at 48.6% and discourse organization at 26.5% of coded features. "The UN must now focus on supporting the building of economies of the world to address issues of poverty and the global financial crisis" (UNGA 2025, Eswatini) is an example cited in the PLOS One article that illustrates modal obligation in sustainability rhetoric.

The PLOS One study (published August 11, 2026) analyzed 21 speeches totaling 50, 644 tokens and 1, 956 sentences drawn from the UNGA 2025 session.
According to the PLOS One article, lexical items accounted for 48.6% of sustainability features and discourse-level problem–solution organization accounted for 26.5% in the corpus.
The PLOS One study found strong syntactic and pragmatic signals: over 72% of modal verbs and 75.6% of passive constructions occurred in SDG-tagged sentences (SDG tagging procedure described in the article).
The PLOS One article maps grammatical patterns (modal verbs, conditionals, passive voice, collective pronouns) to UNESCO competencies and operationalizes them in a five-phase GSIC classroom cycle.

What happened and how the study works

According to the PLOS One article, researchers compiled official English transcripts from the 80th UNGA session (September–October 2025) to build a 50, 644-token corpus across 21 African leaders for multilevel linguistic analysis.

According to the PLOS One article, the study used a 327-item SDG lexicon to tag sentences as sustainability discourse, then analyzed lexical, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, and discourse levels with AntConc and spaCy.

The PLOS One article reports that the authors validated automated tagging with manual checks and achieved Cohen’s kappa values of κ =.81 to.92 on primary coding categories, confirming inter-rater reliability for replication.

Findings snapshot

Date / Source	Metric	Value	Implication
August 11, 2026 / PLOS One	Corpus size	50, 644 tokens; 21 speeches	Authentic UNGA inputs for upper-intermediate/advanced classroom tasks
August 11, 2026 / PLOS One	Feature distribution	Lexical 48.6%; Discourse 26.5%; Pragmatic 16.5%	Design activities that foreground vocabulary + problem–solution sequencing
August 11, 2026 / PLOS One	Syntactic SDG alignment	Modal verbs >72% in SDG contexts; passive constructions 75.6%	Use modal-strength ranking and agency-shifting exercises to teach normativity and systems-thinking
August 11, 2026 / PLOS One	Competency prominence	Strategic 42.6%; Interpersonal 26.4%	Focus tasks on coalition-building, problem–solution organization, and inclusive pronoun use
September–October 2025 / UNGA speeches	Representative quotes	"It is essential that we address the climate crisis..." (UNGA 2025, Angola)	Collective pronouns enact interpersonal competence, use as concordance exemplars

Implications for educators: grammar for sustainability

GSIC makes grammar for sustainability teachable by converting corpus evidence into five classroom phases: noticing, analysis, transformation, production, reflection, according to the PLOS One article.

According to the PLOS One article, lexical emphasis in the corpus (48.6%) means teachers should pair vocabulary work (SDG lexicon items) with targeted grammar tasks that make modality, conditionality, and agency explicit.

Practical classroom moves derived from the PLOS One article include: (1) concordance-based noticing of modal verbs to teach normative competence, (2) conditional rewriting to develop systems-thinking, and (3) production of mini-UNGA speeches to practice strategic competence.

How Evidano Helps

Evidano: quick definition

Evidano is an AI-powered qualitative data analysis platform that helps researchers analyze interviews, open-ended surveys, and documents.

Evidano ingests transcripts, documents, and spreadsheets then produces thematic, frequency, and cross-segment analyses that map directly to pedagogical design tasks like GSIC.

Problem: Preparing and tagging a sustainability corpus is slow

According to the PLOS One article, constructing an SDG lexicon and tagging 50, 644 tokens required lemmatization and manual validation; Evidano automates large parts of that pipeline.

Feature: Evidano can import transcripts or scraped speeches, apply custom SDG dictionaries, and produce sentence-level SDG tagging for immediate pedagogical use; see Evidano features.

Problem: Teachers need concordance lines and collocates but lack corpus tools

According to the PLOS One article, concordance-based noticing is central to GSIC but requires concordance exports and collocate frequency tables.

Feature: Evidano generates concordances, collocate lists, and exportable CSV/JSON datasets so teachers can create phase 1 noticing materials without manual AntConc workflows; see Evidano guides.

Problem: Scaling classroom evaluation and reflection across segments

According to the PLOS One article, GSIC benefits from cross-group comparison (e.g., how different student groups deploy must vs. should).

Feature: Evidano’s AI chat and cross-segment analytics let instructors compare linguistic choices, visualize modal distribution, and produce rubrics tied to UNESCO competencies for rapid formative feedback.

Privacy and reproducibility

According to Evidano’s security page, data uploaded to Evidano is encrypted and the platform does not share customer data with third-party model trainers; see Evidano data security.

Feature: Evidano exports reproducible JSON/CSV artifacts and concordance lists similar to the Supplementary Materials referenced in the PLOS One article, supporting transparent classroom research.

FAQ: grammar for sustainability

What is the Grammar-for-Sustainability Instructional Cycle (GSIC)?

GSIC is a five-phase task cycle (noticing, analysis, transformation, production, reflection) that operationalizes corpus-derived UNGA patterns for classroom grammar and ESD learning.

According to the PLOS One article, GSIC maps modal verbs to normative competence, conditionals to systems-thinking, collective pronouns to interpersonal competence, and problem–solution sequencing to strategic competence.

How can I build an SDG-tagged corpus like the PLOS One study?

You can build an SDG-tagged corpus by collecting official transcripts, applying a curated SDG lexicon, lemmatizing tokens, and validating automated tags with human coders as described in the PLOS One article.

According to the PLOS One article, the authors used a 327-item SDG lexicon, spaCy for lemmatization, and Cohen’s kappa validation on 20% of the corpus to ensure reliability.

Which grammatical features should teachers prioritize for sustainability competencies?

Prioritize modal verbs (must, should), conditional clauses (if…then), passive constructions, and collective pronouns (we, our) because these features map to core UNESCO competencies, according to the PLOS One article.

The PLOS One article reports that modal verbs were over 72% SDG-aligned and passive constructions were 75.6% SDG-aligned, so activities that highlight modality and agency yield clear competency links.

Can GSIC work in low-resource classrooms?

Yes, GSIC can be implemented with printed concordance lines, teacher-curated excerpts, and worksheet transformations as recommended in the PLOS One article.

According to the PLOS One article, GSIC was designed for upper-intermediate learners and can be adapted to low-resource settings using pre-annotated excerpts instead of full corpora.

Conclusion & Next Steps

According to the PLOS One article, African UNGA-2025 speeches provide empirically grounded patterns that make grammar an explicit tool for teaching sustainability competencies via GSIC.

Corpus evidence in the PLOS One study (50, 644 tokens; lexical 48.6%; discourse 26.5%) justifies classroom tasks that combine SDG vocabulary with targeted grammar transformation exercises.

If you want to replicate the study workflow, use AI-enabled qualitative research tools to tag SDG contexts, generate concordances, and produce cross-segment analytics; start by exploring Evidano features.

Ready to try this workflow on your own materials? Try Evidano for free

Topics

grammar for sustainability
GSIC pedagogy
sustainability grammar teaching
corpus-informed pedagogy

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Teaching Sustainability: Grammar for Sustainability

Key Takeaways

What happened and how the study works

Findings snapshot

Implications for educators: grammar for sustainability

How Evidano Helps

Evidano: quick definition

Problem: Preparing and tagging a sustainability corpus is slow

Problem: Teachers need concordance lines and collocates but lack corpus tools

Problem: Scaling classroom evaluation and reflection across segments

Privacy and reproducibility

FAQ: grammar for sustainability

What is the Grammar-for-Sustainability Instructional Cycle (GSIC)?

How can I build an SDG-tagged corpus like the PLOS One study?

Which grammatical features should teachers prioritize for sustainability competencies?

Can GSIC work in low-resource classrooms?

Conclusion & Next Steps

Topics

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