Linguistic Strategies of Knowledge and Scientific Transfer in Texttypes and Media Genres for Children

The concept of Disseminating Knowledge to Children has been attracting public interest for several years now, not only leading to new series of schoolbooks, textbooks, magazines for kids and television programs, but also to a veritable boom in Youth & Kids (Mini-)Universities. These in turn are attracting increasing interest from the scientific media. Surprisingly, however, there has thus far been a major lack of research from a linguistic perspective on the strategic and technical aspects of knowledge dissemination to children. The main goal of the present project is to close this striking research gap by undertaking a systematic linguistic investigation of those linguistic strategies used to impart scientific knowledge and information about science to children. The project focus on written and spoken texts within the case studies 'The Climate' and 'Middle Age' and on the question, which strategies are preferred for which topics and in which media formats. The conceptual questions guiding this investigation focus on how topical, linguistic and textual strategies are combined to ensure comprehensibility, to create which kind of knowledge transformation and to offer entertainment.

DFG Programme Research Grants