Speaking through images: Implementing interaction through the visual language of The Economist. When the visual language becomes a useful tool to activate and improve communicative competence.

This paper will give examples of how the multi-semiotic visual language of “The Economist” provides a resourceful tool for triggering interaction and implementing learners’ spoken production. Images may activate various forms of communication by depicting metaphors as semantic shifts; the metaphorical semiotic code needs to be contextualised, with vehicle, topic and ground decoded first and then re-constructed as the final step. As a result the viewer will be involved in a process of interactive interdependence between shifted and conventional constructions.