Scientific websites for children: Nurturing children’s scientific literacy through the conflation of multiple semiotic resources

Abstract

Nowadays, knowledge dissemination among children is no longer limited to the classroom and course or information books. It also includes websites explicitly addressed to youngsters who have a different stage of cognitive development and background knowledge compared to adults. However, they are also the first to live in today’s multimodal hypertext environment and have a multimodal and multimedial communicative competence. In web-based educational hypermedia, education and entertainment often converge, relying on different semiotic resources. In point of fact, the term ‘edutainment’ is frequently used to describe such a combination. Edutainment websites are also one of the main accesses to science for children. In particular, explanations of scientific phenomena are frequently intertwined with different kinds of visual material, partly evoking science books. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the verbal-visual interplay in three scientific websites designed for children in English, whose express aim is to popularize scientific knowledge.

Keywords:

• Multimodal literacy;
• edutainment;
• educational websites;
• image-text relations;
• scientific knowledge

Acknowledgements

Research for this study was conducted jointly by the two authors. More specifically, Giuliana Diani is responsible for ‘Introduction’, ‘A Multimodal Analysis of Three Educational Websites: Nasa Space Place’, ‘The ‘Sun’ webpage across the three websites: The ‘Sun’ webpage of the Nasa Space Place website; Annalisa Sezzi is responsible for ‘The Multimodal Model of Verbal-Visual Relations’, ‘The Corpus’, ‘A Multimodal Analysis of Three Educational Websites: Ducksters, DKfindout!’, ‘The ‘Sun’ webpage across the three websites: The ‘Sun’ webpage of the Ducksters website, The ‘Sun’ webpage of the DKfindout! website’. Conclusions were written by both authors together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of a National research project financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research: “Knowledge Dissemination across media in English: continuity and change in discourse strategies, ideologies, and epistemologies” [PRIN 2015TJ8ZAS].