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The purpose of this study was to fill gaps in the research to determine if picture books in the high school classroom can enhance student writing especially with word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Previous research has not fully considered employing picture books as mentor texts to examine writing traits in the high school Language Arts classroom. The population was 12 participants from two low track English 10 Reading classes. Six participants were identified from each class as low, medium, or high-performing students based on an informal narrative writing activity. This study employed an action research methodology (Sagor, 2000). Students were taught from an inquiry-based approach as the teacher read aloud each book, and asked students what they noticed. Students reviewed the picture books to guide them as they were challenged to improve their writing. Findings from the study illustrate that picture books as mentor texts can help secondary students of all ability levels improve their word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions in narrative writing as measured by a writing trait rubric created by Vicki Spandel and adapted by Jim Burke. Picture books were tools that helped students think and act like writers. Conclusions also highlighted the lack of word choice and sentence fluency instruction in the students' formative years. This study shed light on the abstract nature of sentence fluency, and an effective way to mitigate this problem. This study provided a new angle with which to teach the writing traits through narrative composition instruction, and teacher modeling. Further, this study adds to the literature of effective high school instruction as picture books as mentor texts are less common in the high school English Language Arts classroom.

The study’s purpose is to examine teachers’ perceptions of genre pedagogy and mentor texts toteach writing in upper-secondary school. Previously many English teachers in Sweden usedprocess pedagogy to teach writing, an approach that encourages students to create drafts andrevise their texts accordingly. The study finds that even though this approach is still active inupper-secondary schools in Sweden, teachers feel that providing time for revisions isimpossible. Further, the study finds that teachers have started to provide their students withmodel texts that can give students a hands-on model for writing their own texts. The use ofmodel texts in genre pedagogy and mentor texts approach will be examined in this study. Thestudy has been conducted using interviews with teachers in upper-secondary schools in Sweden.The interviews were semi-structured and constructed using themes to simplify the analysis ofthe results. The results from the study show that the interviewed teachers of upper-secondaryschools in Sweden believe that students benefit from being provided with models in for writing.The teachers also believe that the students are benefited from seeing the structure of the modeltext, which can encourage students to structure their own writing similarly. The teachersinterviewed in the study perceive genre pedagogy and mentor texts approach to supportstudents’ development as successful communicators in the English written language.