Pedagogical trade-offs in sustainability integration in Indonesian primary-oriented EFL contexts

The integration of sustainability themes into English language teaching (ELT) has increased in response to global Education for Sustainable Development initiatives. However, limited research addresses how teachers interpret and adapt these themes within language-focused classrooms. This qualitative study analyzes written reflections from fourteen Indonesian English teachers who responded to environmental visuals from a primary-level textbook series. The analysis identified three interrelated dimensions of teachers’ anticipated pedagogical reasoning: perceived pedagogical opportunities, perceived barriers and constraints, and the anticipated negotiation of pedagogical trade-offs. Participants regarded environmental themes as valuable for supporting vocabulary development, sentence construction, and communicative language practice. Concurrently, they expressed concerns about lexical difficulty, conceptual abstraction, emotional sensitivity, and geographical distance. Instead of rejecting environmental content, teachers anticipated adapting ecological depth, contextual framing, and linguistic complexity to maintain instructional coherence and developmental appropriateness. These adaptations included strategies such as simplification, localization, repetition, and limited translanguaging support. The study conceptualizes these adaptations as pedagogical trade-offs and proposes a preliminary typology comprising linguistic-conceptual, global-local, depth-manageability, and awareness-emotional safety trade-offs. The findings indicate that sustainability integration in primary-oriented EFL contexts is best understood as a process of pedagogical mediation that aligns environmental awareness with learners’ linguistic readiness and local classroom realities. Implications are discussed for TESOL practice, materials design, and teacher education.