The chapter focuses on one of the storytelling events of the TALES1 (Telling And Listening to Eco-sustainable Stories) initiative. TALES is a series of storytelling events in English L2 for children organised thanks to the collaboration between the University of Udine (Italy) and the Natural History Museum of Friuli (Museo Friulano di Storia Naturale) in Udine (Italy). University students of Primary Education are involved as volunteer storytellers in the events at the museum. The storytelling events are based on picturebooks in English that promote eco-sustainable ways of living, empowering children to care for nature and become custodians of the land. The object of the TALES initiative is helping future teachers of English as a foreign or second language to work on eco-sustainable narratives by selecting picturebooks and involving the children during read-aloud sessions promoting empathy and identification with the environment through stories about nature. TALES is the context for data gathering of my PhD research project which focuses on interactions between adults and children during storytelling events in English L2. The chapter presents the analysis of data collected through a smallscale preliminary study conducted during the first storytelling event of the TALES initiative, in order to test the feasibility of the full-scale research project. The main research questions addressed in the chapter are the following: what criteria do student teachers apply to the selection of picturebooks for their storytelling events? What semiotic resources do they use during their performances in order to orient children's attention to key elements in stories about nature? The corpus of data for the present study includes a semi-structured interview with the volunteer storyteller, the video recording and field notes collected during the storytelling event. Data are discussed in relation to communication about the environment for student teachers and children during storytelling.
