Global Poverty and Foreign Language Education

This chapter provides the theoretical and political foundations for situating global poverty within foreign language pedagogy. It traces how international frameworks, particularly the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and UNESCO’s promotion of education for sustainable development (ESD) and global citizenship education (GCE), have influenced German educational policy and curricula. Through this top-down diffusion of norms, poverty has become an explicit part of English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching. The chapter demonstrates that concepts such as global citizenship, sustainability, and intercultural competence align closely with foreign language education, positioning global poverty as a legitimate component of classroom practice. At the same time, the chapter identifies major challenges, including political idealism and contested legitimacy of the SDGs, risks of unintended consequences, and the tension between learner action and critical reflection in competency-based education. Subject-specific challenges also emerge in EFL education, such as balancing communicative goals with complex social issues, maintaining multiperspectivity, and avoiding ideological bias. A review of existing research reveals significant gaps: poverty is often marginalized in both theory and practice, and when present, it is framed superficially or ideologically. This critical backdrop establishes the need for the empirical analyses presented in the rest of the study.