Nominalization, abstraction and technicality in History and Physical Science: some evidence from Greek primary school textbooks

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse Greek primary school textbooks of History and Physical Science in terms of their abstraction and technicality, which - following Systemic Functional Linguistics - characterize educational knowledge, mainly based on written language. Written texts reconstruct experience into specialized knowledge through the grammatical metaphor of nominalization, which is considered to be strongly related to the recontextualization of oral mode to written mode. Moreover, research on secondary education school texts has shown relevant variety between Physical Science and History texts by means of lexicogrammatical choices employed. But, since relevant research stresses the importance of grammatical metaphor in secondary education, our attempt in this paper is to illustrate some facets of the same phenomenon in Greek primary education textbooks. More specifically, our aim is to analyse some Greek textbooks of History and Physical Science in terms of nominalization in order to account for its ways to pattern specialized fields, according both to grades (A΄ to F΄) and to different school disciplines.