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The magazine Ciência Hoje das Crianças in school literacy: the retextualization of popular science articles

This paper discusses how children's discourses in the classroom (re)produce articles of the magazine Ciência Hoje das Crianças. For this purpose, we analyzed an episode in which the children reported on the texts they had read at home. Bakthin's concepts regarding verbal interaction and microgenetic analysis inspired the theoretical and methodological perspective of analysis. We recorded the work in science classes with children aged 9 to 10 years (4th grade of primary education), in a public school of Belo Horizonte city, Minas Gerais state. We observed that children's discourses contain some aspects of the language of science popularization and of orality. Organizing the class according to the science popularization magazine, in its original support, resulted in retextualizations with evidence of the understanding of the popular science texts, whether for their informative characteristics or for their narrative nature. Furthermore, the analysis of the interaction between orality and writing in the reading reports evidenced that children use science popularization texts both as a discursive practice and as an object, which was related to the development of the metalanguage competence. In this view, retextualization is a literacy practice that allows expressing knowledge, constructing ideas and the ability to use explanatory language.

Learning; Discourse; Science popularization; Primary education; Reading report


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