Writing is a language production skill that is taught in schools in various ways, many of which focus on students practising writing by responding to a stimulus, in the form of a prompt. These prompts and intended to give students a starting point to build from, and they can be of various types, and can take the form of text, static images, or even audio or video. However, the criteria that are used for the selection of such prompts are unclear. This study is focuses on the selection of image prompts for the purpose of practising narrative writing in classrooms.

Thus, the primary objective of this research is to examine images that are used as writing prompts to practise narrative writing in English. Its focus is on the effect of specific content features of image prompts on learners’ writing, namely the number of elements, the level of detail in the image, the level of dynamism in the image, and the foregrounding of specific image elements, in order to understand how these content features affect the written narratives that learners create. Its secondary objective is to explain any such trends, or even lack of trends, from an analysis of the results obtained.

Following a series of preparatory studies which informed the design of the experiment, the main study was conducted with 117 students of Class 5. The writing samples thus obtained were scored by independent raters using a rating scale, and the scores for each learner, as well as features of the writing, were analysed in detail. Results pointed to clear trends in the case of numbers of images, level of dynamism, and level of detail in the image, though no clear trend was visible in the case of foregrounding or emphasis on a single element. These results, as well as their possible causes, are discussed in detail. Finally, we make a case for using image prompts with a specific combination of these content features, in order to aid learner performance in the writing classroom.