Using Picturebooks in EFL Education with Upper Secondary Pupils in Creative Writing, Language and Literature Learning The chapter addresses the question of how advanced language learners can develop their literary and visual competence, as well as their critical and creative faculties, with the help of picturebooks. The study draws on previous research on the use of picturebooks and graphic novels in upper secondary as well as tertiary education. Such analyses tend to focus either on the picturebook as an aesthetic, visual text (Tarbox), or as a vehicle of ideological content (Hecke; Evans). In the former case, definitions, genre and form boundaries, as well as visual effects, writerly “gaps”, and other aesthetic and literary categories are focused (Pantaleo; Foster); in the latter case, the challenging, controversial, but also liberating and empowering possibilities of advanced or “adult” picturebooks are the main object of inquiry (Ommundsen; Leggatt, Maizonniaux, Whitelaw). A third possibility is to highlight the didactic potential of picturebooks (Burwitz-Melzer; Arizpe). In the project described in this chapter, however, all three aspects (the aesthetic, the ideological, and the didactic) are approached through creative writing. The idea is that wordless picturebooks are read, discussed, and “written” in various ways by two cohorts of students, one in tertiary education, the other in (upper) secondary education. After an introductory lecture on graphic novels and picturebooks, particularly wordless, or near wordless picturebooks, the students are placed in groups of four. Each group is given one of the following books: Alessandro Sanna’s The River, Armin Greder’s The Island, Linda Wolfsgruber’s Dolomitensagen, Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer, or Gabriel Pacheco’s La Bruja. In a first workshop the group agrees on a simple outline of the narrative, describes the visual style of the book, and discusses the message or aim of the book. In the next step, the students do the following creative tasks – based on the book’s image sequence, they: • Create a third person narrative (2-4 pages) • Tell the story as dialogue or monologue (direct discourse) • Write the story as a musical (song numbers) or as a series of poems • Analyze the way in which the verbal texts relate to the illustrations, and contribute to (or limit) the overall effect and interpretation of the story • Reflect and comment on the work process, and possible learning outcomes and experiences. Thus, the chapter outlines an educational action research project on picturebooks and creative writing. It is suggested, finally, that the approach has several benefits: the students become better readers, their visual and verbal competence increases; at the same time their writing skills are enhanced , and their critical sensibility sharpened.