Picturebook Mediation for Children’s Ecoliteracy in English L2

The chapter focuses on picturebook read-aloud sessions as multimodal communicative contexts that promote children’s approach to environmental education in a foreign/second language. The initiative TALES (Telling And Listening to Ecosustainable Stories) is the context of observation of the present study. TALES is a series of read-aloud sessions about nature in English L2 for children organized in informal contexts. The aim of the initiative is to promote ecoliteracy through stories that can influence children’s interpretation of events, situations and people and their relationship with the environment (Eisler 2000; Nanson 2021; Stibbe 2021). By adopting a multimodal perspective on communication and interaction (Bezemer and Kress 2016; Jewitt 2017; Norris 2020), the chapter analizes the process of picturebook mediation including storyteller’s picturebook selection and the read-aloud performance with children. The analysis focuses on multimodal aspects that allow storytellers to give salience to natural elements during read-aloud sessions.