Konstantina Iliopoulou, Alexandra Anastasiadou & Eleni Griva
The arrival of repatriates from the former Soviet Union, alongside with increased immigration and a recent surge in refugees, has necessitated a redefinition of Greece’s traditionally monocultural educational system. In this line, the importance of creating appropriate educational institutions which will cater for the newcomers’ education and acquisition of Greek as an L2 came to the lime-light. To this end, intercultural schools in the 90s, and recently reception classes were established to aid newcomers to acquire Greek as an L2, learn to communicate and develop the necessary digi-tal skills so as to be able to process information and become active citizens of the newly emerging inclusive as well as multicultural and multilingual societies. The present paper delved into appropri-ate methods of teaching vocabulary to newcomers. In this line, three books were put under the lens to determine their contribution to the students’ lexical improvement. The crosscurricular ap-proach (Karatzia-Stavlioti, 2002; Matsaggouras, 2003) was selected as the optimal framework for securing a revealing setting within which the lexis of the three books were investigated through the use of content analysis (Bonides, 2003, 2004, 2005) with a view to unveiling the capacity of the crosscurricular methodology to augment the learners’ linguistic and metalinguistic capacity. The accrued data advocated that the books under discussion capitalized on crossscurricularity to boost the learners’ linguistic dexterity. Tentative suggestions were introduced for ameliorating newcom-ers’ lexical ability by taking into account their diverse educational and cultural backgrounds.
Key words: Newcomers in Greece, school coursebooks, content analysis, linguistic enhancement.