This study investigates how a genre-based methodology, focused on literacy development, as suggested by the National Curricular Parameters, and anchored in multimodality facilitates knowledge- construction by a group of English as a Foreign Language students, aged 9-10, in the 3rd grade of a private elementary school in Rio de Janeiro. This research is based on Allwright & Bailey (1991), and Wenger (1998), for whom the classroom is a space favourable to knowledge-construction; on Kern (2000) and Johns (1997), whose theories focus on the social and cognitive aspects of literacy, and on Kress (2000), Stein (2000), and Royce (2002), concerning the intersemiotic complementarity which facilitates the knowledge-construction process. The corpus of this study is composed of student-produced texts selected to exemplify the stages of drafting, re-drafting, illustrated text-writing and text- transposition to comic strips, which were developed during the exploration of a text book unit. The analysis of this material was carried out according to Halliday and Hasan (1989) and Ventola (1987a), for whom language is an expression of social behaviour in situational contexts, and according to Kress & van Leeuwen (1996), who point out the importance of the visual semiotic system as a resource for meaning- making. The text analysis and the reflection on the pedagogical work developed suggest the importance of offering challenging activities that are focused on a genre-based approach, as resources for learners to appropriate themselves of the target language in social contexts, while showing in their texts their social-historicalcultural experiences.