DOI: 10.18848/2327-0136/cgp/a179 ISSN: 2327-266X

Texture in Greek School History Textbooks

Ioannis Papagiannopoulos, Marianna Kondyli
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While contemporary school textbooks remain central pedagogical tools that reshape students’ experience, they are not solely composed of written language; they also integrate images, diagrams, and other visual resources, making them multisemiotic. Meaning in such texts emerges not from language or image in isolation but from their interaction. This has led to growing interest in multisemiotic cohesion and intersemiotic texture, understood as systematic relations between semiotic resources in the meaning-making process. This study, drawing on a social semiotic framework advanced by systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA), examines how cohesive devices and intersemiotic relations contribute to multisemiotic cohesion in Greek secondary school history textbooks. The findings, which are based on patterns identified across the full corpus, with selected examples included in this article for illustrative purposes, indicate a predominance of lexical cohesion and conjunctive logical relations in the linguistic text, which are extended across semiotic modes through intersemiotic cohesive devices such as parallelism, participant tracking, and other contextualizing relations. The study argues that such analysis can inform the development of multimodal literacy by supporting learners’ semiotic awareness and critical engagement with historical interpretation, particularly with respect to causality and temporality. Also, implications for literacy pedagogy, curriculum design, and textbook writing are discussed.

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