Abstract

The intersection of multilingual education and the development of awareness for aquatic conservation is a novel issue within the scope of interdisciplinary environmental psychology. This conceptual paper aims to assess the impact of multilingual education on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of awareness for aquatic conservation in coastal communities. The study employs a qualitative conceptual synthesis approach. This is integrated with environmental psychology, sociolinguistics, and marine literacy, enabling the author to construct a theoretical model of the interrelationship between language complexity and conservation-related thoughts and actions. The author concludes that the study of several languages within a community encourages the understanding of several marine science concepts, emotional closeness/commitment, and relation through culturally valuable stories, and active participation in marine conservation. The author attributes this to the interaction among linguistic inclusiveness, identity congruence, and the environmental attitudes of coastal communities' socio-ecological systems. The author suggests the development of ecological multilingual curricula and awareness designed to enhance participation in communication within spatially and socially diverse coastal communities to achieve the proposed practical objectives of the study, which address socio-ecological systems for the international community and encourage sustainable development of marine resources and biodiversity conservation. The proposed conceptual model is rooted in interdisciplinary constructs akin to integrated environmental education research, which comprises psychological, linguistic, and conservation elements.

Keywords: Multilingual education, Aquatic conservation, Ocean literacy, Environmental psychology, Coastal communities, Pro-Environmental behavior