Recontextualizing Commonsence Knowledge in «Social and Physical Environment Studies) of Irst and 3rd Grade Greek Elementary School Textbooks: The Representations of Social and Physical World

Kondyli Marianna & Eirini Maniou

Dept. of Educational Sciences and Early Childhood Education, University of Patras

In the socialsemiotic approach to language developed by Hallydayans Systemic Functional Linguistics, the role of language in constituting educational knowledge has been explicitly shown. Crucial parameter in the constitution of educational knowledge is considered to be decontextuaiized language, such as definitions and classification, conceived as necessary in generalized meaning. In the present paper tools of the Systemic Functional Linguistics, more specifically the Transitivity system, are used in analysing two textbooks in the matter of Social and Physical Environment Studies (intitled We and the World) of elementary school's Irst and 3rd grade; our analysis focuses on the representation of expenencial meaning. The analysis of the corpus highlightes different lexicogrammatic realizations in recontextualizion of the same thematic areas from grade to grade, as well as in the variation of definitions and classifications of social and physical entities, thus according to the paradigm of the distinction between social and physical sciences.