A explicação na divulgação científica para crianças

Abstract

This study is linked to a larger research plan, developed by Giering (2008-2012), which focuses on projects for textual-discursive processes involved in the spreading of science media oriented to children. The objective of this paper is to analyze the presence of the explanation in those texts, aiming to answer the following questions: What are the linguistic-discursive marks that indicate the presence of the explanation in the corpus? How does the explanation cause effect in those texts? In addition, since we have identified text producers in the context of communication, such as journalists, scientists and specialists, we wonder if / how those different identities of speakers produce any change in the explanations given. The corpus consists of 34 texts published online by the magazines Ciência Hoje das Crianças (Today Children's Science), Recreio (Playtine), Mundo Estranho (Strange World) and by the children's section Folhinha, from the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. Two perspectives of analysis are focused: first, the compositional-sequence structure of the corpus is analyzed, as proposed by Adam (2001, 2008, 2011), verifying how the explanatory movements take place. Then, in a stated-communicational perspective, as proposed by Moirand (1999), we examined features that enabled us to identify, in texts, the structures and forms of the explanation. After data analysis, we found that the explanation is present in the compositional-sequence structure of texts, with the organization of many texts through explanatory dominant sequences, i.e., the explanatory sequence opens and closes the text, or else, with the insertion of fitting explanatory sequences. However, even without the presence of explanatory sequences, we noted text plans that compete in the accomplishment of macro speech act in order to explain. From a stated-communicational perspective, we identified linguistic-discursive clues that signal for an explanatory communication structure which can be represented as follows: A [text producer] explains to B [reader] that S (science) says that (X explains Y). We still found in the text, the explanation of specialized terms, which is related either to the anticipation of a possible demand for explanation by the reader or to the global perspective to explain, to make a phenomenon or a process clear. In relation to the comparative analysis of the texts in the corpus regarding possible observable differences in the explanations produced by journalists and scientists or experts, we found that all texts written by scientists or journalists presented the canonical structure of explanation in compositional-sequence level, which means, the explanatory sequence is the dominant sequence. In the texts written by journalists, there is a higher variation on compositionalsequence structure. We also identified, in the 24 texts written by journalists, 12 occurrences of reported speech through direct citation of the speech produced by scientists and experts, but no entries in the writing produced by scientists or experts