The main purpose of this study is to understand the use of visual texts in the classroom and their impact on learning. The research focuses on how the use of visual texts can facilitate the application of a construction of meanings and the socio- interactional perspective on teaching/learning, according to Bakhtin (2000), Freire (1979), Mercer (1994) and Vygotsky (1994). With this theoretical framework, the study applies the grammar of visual design (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996) to a classroom setting by examining the learners’ interpretations of the images used by the teacher, to observe to what extent their observations evoke the categories in the grammar of visual design and thus indicate knowledge of how to read images. The study discusses the implications of an approach to teaching and learning that aims at building visual literacy in the setting of English language teaching.