References to environmental literacy in the environmental education literature tend not to pay specific attention to fundamental debates about literacy, for example concerning the limits of textuality. If it can be argued that we 'read' the environment, then the scope of environmental literacy is even larger than that of environmental education. However, it is hard to justify the relevance of 'literacy' in a narrower sense than this as any more than marginal in environmental education. In this article, we define a weak conception as one which is inconsistent or unclear in these respects in the field of environmental education; a strong conception takes a broad view of literacy and acknowledges its full ramifications with respect to environmental education.

As part of a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), school students in the West of England were asked about their perceptions of the importance of modern foreign languages and about their reasons for liking and disllking them, particularly as this bore on the process of subject option choices. The results are compared with those of a similar project in the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, the students were at least as negative in their attitudes overall as in the earlier study, despite more recent changes in curricula and teaching approaches. Specific aspects of the results and their implications are discussed with reference to possible strategies to facilitate improvement.