Based on the dialogical relationship between visual text and recipient, this contribution addresses the question of which cultural patterns learners of German as a foreign language revert to when writing about the textless graphic novel The Arrival. The knowledge that is anchored in the appeal structure of the visual text is thereby made explicit and correlated with the learner's interpretive decisions. Assuming that meaning does not exist beyond its articulation, this empirical study focuses not only on what learners see in the visual text, but also on how their interpretations are verbally articulated in order to draw conclusions for culture-based learning.