The digital age offers greater opportunities to apply visuals in business education. Visuals can best develop the 21st century skills and help understand complex theories and abstract ideas, lead to activating cognitive processes in analyzing and systematizing the data and find a focused condensed way of representing them, produce the required emotional and aesthetic appeal. The direct connection between language and cognition provide rationale for this study. The use of images in language learning has a long history and can set an
example how to motivate students and turn them into active life-long learners. The experience of combining language instruction with content learning and developing critical thinking skills, creativity, collaboration, communication has shown good results at the faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg state university, where interdisciplinarity and liberal educational methods create the right environment for studying visual literacy and joining the efforts of the faculty in working out the criteria for choosing the visuals for the course and studying their impact on the learning outcomes of students enrolled in disciplines other than Visual Arts.