Integrating Environmental Awareness in ELT Through Picturebooks

This paper provides a report of classroom experiences that provide insight into the use of a picturebook to raise students’ environmental awareness in an ELT primary context in Argentina. It describes how a picturebook can help build reading comprehension in a second language and foster learning across the curriculum mediated by literature. First, we discuss how picturebooks can contribute to ELT and to raising students’ awareness of environmental citizenship. Then, we present two pedagogical interventions with children aged 9 to 11 years old that made use of a teacher-produced picturebook dealing with the environmental issue of wildfire devastation. Through examples of children’s performance in activities that accompanied the reading events, we illustrate how children can make use of non-linguistic resources to understand linguistic input in a second/foreign language and interpret the meaning of a story. The experiences also reveal a teacher-initiated approach to facilitate reflection about environmental issues through picturebooks.