Twenty-first-century language education involves paying attention to the multimodal pedagogical demands of a global digital world. To this end, effective English language teaching (ELT) requires preparation on the part of instructors in terms of consciously guiding learners' literacy development and integrating multiple modes of creating meaning that are broader than language alone. This article supports the notion of literacy as a multidimensional concept and proposes a multimodal toolkit as a means for teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) to work with key literary and visual elements. Focusing on the reading of The Snow Lion (Helmore and Jones 2017), we discuss the meaningful interaction between words and images that defines picturebooks and implement the multiliteracies pedagogy approach, which is comprised of four knowledge processes, i.e., experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying. The final objective is to guide young students to produce meaning and think critically in the EFL classroom through the analysis and interpretation of picturebooks.