The central issue in this book is how the verbal element and visual elements are integrated into a coherent whole in the English learning advertisement genre.Although there have been a number of studies on the visual-verbal relations in multimodal texts which have great implications for the current task，as reviewed in Chapter 2（for the summary，see Section 2.3），they cannot account for the complexity of the coherence construction in complex multimodal discourses like the print English learning advertisements under discussion.Therefore new perspectives are needed in terms of both discourse coherence in general and multimodality in order to establish a new framework for conceptualizing and analyzing the construction of coherence in complex multimodal discourses.For this end，insights from the discourse coherence in purely linguistic sense will be combined with the special features in multimodal English learning advertisements.The new framework of coherence construction will provide a guideline for the definition and conceptualization of global coherence，local coherence and cohesion in the print English learning advertisements，and also the analysis of the patterns of each of them in the following chapters.

This chapter will address this need by advancing such a theoretical framework which allows systematic，effective，and empirically sound results in the analysis.The establishment of the framework for analyzing coherence construction in multimodal discourses will be discussed in Section 3.1.Before putting the theoretical and analytical framework to use，this chapter also outlines the overall research design of this book，including the data，research framework and methods.The rationale underlying the research design will also be explained in this section.The data used in this book—the print English learning advertisements in China—will be analyzed in Section 3.2.Specifically，this section will introduce the collection of the data and the genre structure and characteristics of these advertisements.The research framework of the whole book will be introduced in Section 3.3.Section 3.4 will elaborate on the research methods employed in this book，including those for the data analysis and for the empirical research on reader reaction.