From the view that language is a social construct that is inseparable from its situational and cultural context, the main objective of the present study is to describe and analyze German advertisements in printed form, focusing on the relationship between their verbal and non-verbal components. The analysis is primarily based on the principles of Halliday`s (1994) systemic-functional grammar and on the categories in the visual grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996). Thus, the description and analysis of the linguistic and extra-linguistic components in the advertisements are used to observe the relationships between the advertisements as genre. In addition to the analysis of the verbal and nonverbal features of advertisements, the study made use of a questionnaire distributed to professionals that teach German as a foreign language in various institutions in Rio de Janeiro. In light of the responses to the questionnaire, the present study discusses questions related to how culture is approached in the classroom and whether visual elements are significantly explored in the teaching materials used by these teachers. The aim of the research is twofold: it proposes the importance of encouraging contextualized foreign language teaching and it attempts to contribute to the discussion on the teaching of German as a foreign language, from a multiple perspective that includes genre, context, culture and visual communication.