Integrating sustainability into language teaching: identity-mediated agency among English as a Foreign Language teachers

As ESD gains prominence across educational policy and practice, questions remain about how it is taken up in subject areas where its relevance is less settled. In English Language Teaching (ELT), research has largely focused on barriers to sustainability integration, but has paid scant attention to the interpretive processes through which language teachers judge its relevance to their work. This study addresses that gap by examining how English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ identity commitments shape the achievement of agency in relation to sustainability integration. Informed by an ecological perspective, the study understands agency as an emergent accomplishment shaped through the interplay of past trajectories, situated conditions, and future orientations. Through semi-structured narrative interviews with five EFL teachers working in Turkey, the analysis identifies two broad identity commitments, which influenced how EFL teachers interpreted the legitimacy and feasibility of sustainability work within ELT. Teachers with values-led commitments tended to treat constraints as open to pedagogical reworking, whereas curriculum-led commitments were associated with narrower interpretation of what counted as appropriate sustainability work in practice. The study suggests that sustainability integration in subjects not traditionally associated with environmental concerns depends not only on structural support, but also on how teachers interpret contextual conditions, disciplinary purpose, and professional responsibility through their identity commitments.