Notes on systemic functional linguistics, context of situation and transitivity with examples from children’s picture books

ABSTRACT Systemic functional Linguistics has contributed to studies in Applied Linguistics and other related areas of study. Thus, in this paper I first present an overview of SFL, the context of situation and the metafunctions, and then I move to the system of transitivity, with examples of material, mental and relational processes, drawn from the corpus of children and teenage picture books from the project entitled ‘Social practices in contemporaneity: multiliteracies, identities and multimodal narratives’. As a theoretical and methodological support for the analysis of texts produced in different media and social contexts, SFL can contribute to an understanding of language as a multissemiotic social practice in educational contexts.