Book excerpt: New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse offers a comprehensive international view of multimodal discourse and presents new directions for research and application in this growing field. With contributions from top scholars around the world, this work opens up the field of multimodal discourse analysis as it covers a wide range of interests such as computational linguistics, education, ideology, and media discourse. The range and scope of the chapters in this book provide groundbreaking insights into exploring and accounting for the various facets of multimodality in a range of texts and contexts. Initial chapters specifically aim to tackle theoretical issues, while subsequent chapters focus on important research areas such as writing and graphology, genre, ideology, computational concordancing, literacy, and cross cultural and cross linguistic issues. In the final chapters, an emphasis is placed on the educational implications of multimodality in first and second language contexts, a particularly new and interesting contribution.