“Hello, my name is Coronavirus”: Popularizing COVID-19 for children and teenagers

The aim of this paper is to examine the popularization strategies adopted in texts destined for children and teenagers which deal with COVID-19. It is well documented that the age and the cognitive profile of the target reader have a strong bearing on the structure and nature of a text (Bruti 2019) and that popularization strategies are adjusted in different ways (Turnbull 2015). As Kolucki and Lemish (2011) emphasize, there is a need for communication with children in a way that is age-appropriate and suitable to their needs and interests. Following this research strand, in this paper we analyze the popularization strategies associated with the explanation of coronavirus in relation to the age of the addressee. To this purpose we focus on English booklets and websites dealing with COVID-19 which address two different age groups, children and teenagers. Attention is paid to examples that highlight popularization strategies on the basis of their verbal and visual elements. The basic methodological framework of this study is discourse analysis, with reliance on notions taken from multimodality (Bateman 2014; Kress – van Leeuwen 2020). This provides instruments suitable for identifying cases where the visual mode interacts with the verbal mode to support popularization strategies.