Esquadrinhando a Ciência: estudo da linguagem presente em quadrinhos de ciências

Abstract

Interest in the use of comics for science teaching has remained constant since the mid-2000s, with an increase in interest around 2015. Many studies indicate that the use of comics in science teaching brings learning benefits. However, these studies focus on benefits linked to students' motivation to learn or the “fun” aspect of comics. Although the interaction between the visual and verbal language of comics is pointed out as a factor that favors learning, few works explore this interaction and none studies it in depth. In order to characterize and analyze the potential that this multimodal language of comics has to impact science teaching, fundamentals of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (LSF) were used, especially the works of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) and Davies (2019), in addition to Bruner's (2002) contributions to the study of how the narrative aspects of science comics interact with their conceptual aspects. With this framework, this work makes a qualitative analysis of a corpus of 184 scientific comics to characterize them in terms of their pedagogical (target audience, role in teaching, etc.) and linguistic aspects, in addition to a quantitative study of the typical grammatical structures of the scientific language (technical words, grammatical metaphors, use of passive voice and conceptual representational structures) and the narrative strategies generally used to mediate between readers and this scientific language. In both analyses, the linguistic aspects were correlated with the pedagogical ones and significant variations were observed in the presence and quantity of these linguistic strategies for each age group and pedagogical use. While practically all comics analyzed had the presence of at least one scientific language structure, comics aimed at an adult audience and with an explanatory purpose presented a much larger number of these structures than comics explicitly aimed at children. With this, we argue that the view that comics are “simple” and “universal” masks the richness and diversity of this mode of communication and that comic book producers (teachers or students) use more of the structures of scientific language in their materials to take advantage of their potential and make more consistent use of narrative strategies in mediating with the public.