Leonzini Luisella (2012) Speaking through the images of The Economist. When the visual language becomes a useful tool to activate and improve communicative competence, In Taylor, C. Gori, F. (eds.), Aspetti della didattica e dell'apprendimento delle lingue straniere, pp. 52-77, Edizioni EUT: Trieste. ISBN 978-88-8303-331-5

The purpose of this paper is to provide reasons why the use of multimodal tools may improve the productive skill of speaking in the process of learning a foreign language. I will start by exploring how communication, as a process of interaction which involves participants (producer, receiver) giving, receiving and sharing information, discussing (agreeing, disagreeing) and negotiating over the message/s, cannot be efficiently organised and developed if the interactors lack competence. I will summarize how, in the last sixty years, various scholars have elaborated the concept of competence as a multi-faceted system of knowledge and skills (linguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, strategic, organisational) aimed at language and communication performance. I will proceed by focussing on the communicative approach, among the various methods and approaches to language learning, as a valid instrument to develop knowledge about language and knowledge about how to use it, in terms of communicative competence. I will examine the reasons why this approach may be considered appropriate to shape a communicative syllabus. I will explain how I organised a communicative syllabus for an English course at the Faculty of Education (University of Trieste) in the Communication Sciences degree course. I will give reasons for the choice I first made to work on how The Economist uses the verbal mode, and why I secondly decided to extend my analysis to why the images in the British magazine may be useful tools to practise the productive skill of speaking. Finally, I will provide an example, by analysing a cover of the magazine, of how Halliday’s systemic functional approach to the verbal language, can be adapted and employed when working on multimodal discourse, where the verbal and the visual mode coexist, thus giving learners some practical and functional instruments to develop linguistic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic competence, thus building effective communication as intended by Dell Hymes (1972).