ALT 8: LUIS MARTÍNEZ-KLEISER ANALYSES HOW SCIENCE IS RECONTEXTUALISED IN TEXTS FOR ADOLESCENTS
Luis Martínez-Kleiser, together with other team members, partook in the 8th edition of the Congress of Applied Linguistics Today – “Modern approaches to old and new challenges”. It took place at the Faculty of Philology (Belgrade) and was held over a span of three days, 23rd-25th May 2025.
He presented some of his findings from an analysis of his corpus of web-hosted science dissemination texts directed at a teenage public, with a paper named “Recontextualizing scientific content for adolescent audiences in the digital medium: Analyzing explanatory strategies”. Quantitative and qualitative data were provided to shed light on the use and interplay of explanatory strategies and engagement devices in connection with the rhetorical structure of these digital texts.
His abstract reads as follows:
Recontextualizing scientific content for adolescent audiences in the digital medium: Analyzing explanatory strategies
Adolescent audiences show significant interest in topics of concern, such as mental and physical health, climate change, and renewable energy sources. These topics are closely linked to their reality, and this demographic frequently turns to digital sources, such as websites, for information.
To make expert content accessible to this audience, recontextualization plays a key role. It is therefore crucial to understand the strategies used by writers of digital texts to facilitate comprehension for this demographic (Lorés, 2023). Past studies have highlighted specific explanatory strategies employed for this purpose (Mur-Dueñas, 2024) and how this cognitive discourse function supports the development of academic language, which enhances comprehension (Dalton-Puffer, 2013).
This paper analyzes the process of recontextualization and the extent to which these strategies are employed to generate engagement (Hyland, 2009) with scientific texts. A corpus of 30 digital texts, compiled under the name SciDisTA, was analyzed to do so. These texts focus on health and natural
sciences and target young adult audiences. They originate from three websites that include links to the academic papers from which the information is derived and author attributions to enhance content credibility. SciDisTA is part of the general corpus developed by the InterGEDI research group under the name SciDis (Scientific Dissemination).
The findings provide insights into the role of explanatory strategies as a cognitive discourse function when recontextualizing expert scientific content and demonstrate how these strategies create engagement. Additionally, the analysis clarifies whether information has been simplified or decomplexified in the recontextualization process to achieve its communicative purpose.
References
Dalton-Puffer, C. (2013). A construct of cognitive discourse functions for conceptualising content-language integration in CLIL and multilingual education. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 216-253. https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2013-0011
Hyland, K. (2009). Corpus Informed Discourse Analysis: The Case of Academic Engagement. In M. Charles , D. Pecorari & S. Hunston (Eds.), Academic Writing: At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse (pp. 110–128). London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474211703.ch-006
Lorés, R. (2023) ‘Dual voices, hybrid identities: the recontextualization of research in digital dissemination scientific discourse.’ Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 93, 69-84. https://doi.org/10.5209/clac.85566
Mur-Dueñas, P. (2024). Digital dissemination practices: An analysis of explanatory strategies in the process of recontextualising specialised knowledge. Discourse and Interaction, 17(1), 94-114. https://doi.org/10.5817/di2024-1-94