<![CDATA[The integration of ecological literacy into English Language Teaching (Eco-ELT) frequently depends on globalised, Western-centred environmental narratives which, while promoting environmental awareness, may unintentionally marginalise local cultural identities, indigenous ecological knowledge, minority languages, and the lived environmental realities of socio-economically vulnerable communities. This study addresses that problem by re-examining an Eco-ELT needs analysis through a decolonial and culturally sustaining lens, and by deriving from it a framework for designing digital modules that affirm rather than erase young learners’ identities. The research employed an exploratory mixed-methods needs analysis involving 60 elementary school students and seven teachers in Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia, a rapidly industrialising periphery of Jakarta where Sundanese and Betawi heritage coexists with acute and socially uneven environmental burdens such as Cisadane River pollution, flooding, and unmanaged waste. Questionnaires, interviews, focus group discussions, and curriculum analysis examined learners’ interest, environmental attitudes, media preferences, and digital readiness, alongside teachers’ eco-literacy, digital readiness, and expectations. Three findings bear directly on identity. Learners engage most readily with environmental English when it is tied to actions in their own immediate surroundings, such as recycling and keeping the school clean, rather than to distant global narratives. Teachers explicitly request contextualised environmental examples and modules that address local environmental issues alongside curriculum alignment. Engagement with digital tasks is lower at the least-resourced school site, indicating that a digitally delivered module risks distributing its benefits along the same gradient as environmental harm itself. Crucially, the instruments did not elicit learners’ cultural identity, home-language repertoires, or familiarity with indigenous ecological knowledge (kearifan lokal), and this absence is reported here as a substantive finding about how Eco-ELT needs analysis is conventionally framed. The study therefore proposes a decolonial framework for interactive Eco-ELT module design, local ecological knowledge as structural content, translanguaging across learners’ full repertoires, place-based and justice-oriented environmental themes, offline-capable delivery, and consent-and-reciprocity protocols for community knowledge, and specifies the empirical agenda required to test it.]]>
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