The research is motivated by considerations in the following two aspects：

Firstly，in terms of the data used in the current book—English learning advertisements，the special status of English learning in contemporary China predicts that an in-depth analysis of them will be a valuable and interesting undertaking.An in-depth analysis of the semiotic content and configurations in them will reveal how English teaching and learning are represented by these advertisements，and the empirical research on the reader reaction will uncover how they are received by readers as potential customers in China.

Secondly，the last decade has witnessed a rise in the research interest in the multiplicity of meaning making in human communication.The studies of discourse have broken through the boundary of language and extend to non-verbal meaning-making resources such as gestures，images，music，and so on.A large body of them draws on insights of Halliday's social semiotic theory of language and follows the framework of ideational，interpersonal and textual meta-functions in the description and conceptualization of meaning-making in multi-semiotic discourses（see for example，Kress and van Leeuwen，1996;Baldry and Thibault，2006;O'Halloran 2004b;Royce 1998;Ventola et al，2004）.But as admitted by many of these researchers（see for example Royce and Bowcher，2007;Liu and O'Halloran，2009;Jewitt 2009：3;Bateman and Wildfeuer，2014;Feng and Low，2015），the study on how the multiple semiotic resources combine to form a coherent discourse is still inadequate.There still remains a lack of research on the nature of inter-semiotic semantic relations and what features make multimodal texts coherent across different semiotic modes.This book aims to examine the ways in which coherence is constructed across the visual and verbal modalities in the English learning advertisements in China as a special type of multimodal discourse.

As Bateman（2009）points out for the researchers of multimodality，“the main task for the immediate future must（therefore）be to undertake detailed empirical analyses with respect to more representative samples of multimodal documents”（Bateman，2009：63），this book attempts to undertake such a theoretically-driven，empirically sound and in-depth analysis based on the English learning advertisements in China as a special multimodal genre.