The natural environment fundamentally underpins our lives, and for which we have paid scant recognition over the years. Yet the world has suddenly become eco-conscious. There has been an awakening awareness of how important the environment to human survival is. The prefix ECO- is derived from the Greek word Oikos, meaning home. Eco began to mean the environment.

Ecocriticism has emerged in literary and cultural studies as a consequence of the rediscovery and reconnection with the natural world. It concerns understanding literary texts and how they shape and illuminate our relationship to the environment. It was first referred to as “literary ecology” by Joseph Meeker. The term “Ecocriticism” was coined by William Rueckert in his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism”, in 1978. ecocriticism demands us to examine ourselves and the world around us, critiquing the way that we represent, interact with, and construct the environment, both natural and man-made.

Michael Halliday’s speech in 1990, New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics, encouraged linguists to examine language in the ecological context. Ecolinguistics examines the role of language in matters of climate change and environmental destruction.

The awareness that we have reached the age of environmental crisis, a time when the effect of human culture is damaging the planet ecosystem, added a new responsibility to teachers of English language. Eco-ELT helps students to discover their role as environmental servants by teaching English Language through Eco-themed topics.

The ecological crisis has urged translators, whose task is to bridge the gap between different languages and cultures, to connect between the nonhuman and the human. Eco-translation is about a new frame of understanding how to sympathize and collaborate with the nonhuman organisms and elements that constitute our planet.

The 15th annual conference of the Department of English Language takes us into the natural environment through the portals of Ecocriticism, Ecolinguistics, Eco-ELT, and Eco-Translation. Our conference is an interdisciplinary approach to the global ecological crisis through the intersection of literature, linguistics, ELT, and translation. It aims at highlighting the values that we base our realities on and building an ecological culture through the path of language.