LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching
Vol 28, No 2 (2025): October 2025

CORPUS-INFORMED AND CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ADDRESSING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGS)

Mambu, Joseph Ernest (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
17 Sep 2025

Abstract

This paper showcases how a do-it-yourself (DIY) corpus on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be used to increase corpus users’ language awareness (at word, phrase, sentence, and discourse levels) and criticality. To this end, the author justifies the close link between corpus linguistics, various critical approaches, and SDGs in the applied linguistics/ELT literature. Subsequently, the author provides an overview of principles for creating a specialized DIY corpus containing around 700,000 words/tokens based on 882 articles of The Jakarta Post from 2012 to mid-2024. In view of critical discourse analysis in corpus linguistics, SDG-related key word(s) in context (KWIC) were analyzed in four stages to examine their (1) frequencies and collocates, (2) concordance lines, (3) larger contexts within or across texts in the corpus (or beyond), and (4) potential to stimulate questions aiming at social transformation. In the findings, the four-stage analyses explore two of the most frequent SDGs in the corpus – “gender” (SDG 5) and “clean water and sanitation” (SDG 6) – to illustrate poststructuralist and Marxist criticality, respectively. The decolonial criticality is demonstrated through a corpus analysis of the word “indigenous” and its collocates. Possible pedagogical applications of the corpus-informed approach are also discussed.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

LLT

Publisher

Subject

Arts Humanities Education Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media Social Sciences

Description

LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching, to be published twice a year, namely in April and October, is a scientific peer-reviewed journal published by the English Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta. The ...