1.4.3　The material features of the English learning advertisements

The English learning advertisements are multimodal documents which incorporate resources of more than one semiotic system，such as language，pictures，color，diagrams and typographical features.Most of them take the form of a color leaflet which consists of four or six pages and can be folded.Only a few are single-leaf advertisements which have a front and back page.Some language schools even include a booklet in their promotional material which consists of a large number of pages with detailed information of the courses they provide.On each of the leaflet there are photos，drawings，chunks of verbal text and sometimes graphs.The quantity of both verbal texts and images in many leaflets could be said to be rather large，for instance，a leaflet has a composite of about 1，000 Chinese characters and 6 pictures on one page only，not including pictures and texts on other pages and two covers.Roughly speaking，there are altogether approximately 100，000 words and several hundreds of visual images under examination.A sample of these leaflets is given in Figure 1.1 below.

Figure 1.1　A sample of the English learning leaflets

This is a foldable color leaflet of a certain English language school.If unfolded，the whole picture is as presented above.On the front cover，there are several obligatory elements including a big attractive picture，the name，logo and slogan of the specific school and often the name of the program being promoted.The inside page usually contains longer verbal texts about strengths of their teaching service and some smaller pictures.The back cover often reiterates the strengths of the training school or call for action，but it necessarily includes the contact information such as phone，address，website and transportation information.

What is noteworthy is that this leaflet is one of a series of similar ones promoting different teaching programs of the same school.This one is for the teenager program，parallel to three leaflets for other programs aiming respectively at preschool children，primary school children，and an overseas traveling program.All the leaflets in the series share similar layout，structure and style.

These features lead to two points which are related to our study here.One is that these leaflets are for different promotional purposes，some for a specific course or program，for example，a spoken English course，some for brand imaging and don't include any details of programs.Different purposes of the leaflets determine that there is no uniform pattern in terms of content，length or structure.The other point is the idiosyncratic features of these language schools.That is，it's natural to find similarity between the ads of the same organization and dissimilarity among those of different organizations，since each employs different group of advertisement designers who have different understanding，professional skills and habits of practice.

In spite of the individualistic variation，these English learning advertisements display many interesting common generic features since they share similar discourse topics，communicative purposes as well as constraints operating on their construction，consumption and interpretation.It is the specific genre that this book studies rather than the individual piece of advertisement.In this sense this book is also a genre study on the multimodal English learning advertisements from the perspective of coherence.