Fostering Fourth graders’ Creative Narrative Writing Through the Picture Book Creation Process: An Action Research in a Vietnamese Context

The 2018 Vietnamese Literacy Curriculum emphasizes developing elementary students’ creative narrative writing, which requires innovative teaching approaches. This study aims to explore how the picture book creation process fosters fourth graders’ creative narrative writing. Specifically, 11 fourth graders in this study interacted with nine professionally authored picture books as writing models, then created their own through the writing process: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Primary data was collected from field notes, student artifacts, and interviews. The findings illustrated that through the writing process, students had numerous opportunities to flexibly develop six creative narrative writing skills: (1) connecting with personal experiences, (2) listing details, (3) selecting and cutting irrelevant details, (4) reviewing and adding details, (5) polishing writing, and (6) public storytelling. Consequently, they were able to create their own picture books, which demonstrated their multimodal literacies as they combined text and visual elements to narrate their unique stories and express their personal thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Such results suggest that the picture book creation process is an innovative approach that should be employed in authentic mother tongue writing classrooms.