7.1　Eye-tracking experiment on the coherence construction in the English learning advertisements

As discussed in Section 3.4，the combination of the inductive approach of the eyetracking analysis and the deductive approach of the semiotic analysis offers rich opportunities for the development of challenging interdisciplinary research in the field of discourse studies，especially discourse processing which is closed related to the construction of discourse coherence.However，to date，research on the eye movement in the reading of multimodal print advertisements is scarce.As Rayner et al（2001）conclude，“there is no cognitive process theory that makes clear predictions about eye movements and attention while viewing print advertisements”.Whereas interest in how multimodal artefacts are perceived and interacted with is growing，significant advances are likely to emerge from eye-tracking research.Therefore，the eye-tracking experiment on the multimodal English learning advertisements has huge significance in the understanding of cognitive and mental activities involved in the comprehension of multimodal discourses.Because eye movement data can reflect how coherence resources in the text are perceived and processed by the reader，they can serve as triangulation for the framework proposed in section 3.1 and the semiotic analysis in Chapters 4，5，and 6.

Section 7.1.1 will briefly introduce the facilities used in the eye-tracking experiment.Section 7.1.2 will introduce the research design and methods of the experiment.In section 7.1.3 the eye movement data concerning the experiments in general will be reported in order to give a bird's eye view of the participants'reading behavior.Section 7.1.4 will report and discuss the eye-tracking experiment results concerning the three levels of coherence construction，namely global coherence，local coherence and surface cohesion.Section 7.1.5 will be a general discussion.