Welcome to the Translating Science for Young People website
The Translating Science for Young People project is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is being project-managed by Professor Alice Deignan in the School of Education at The University of Leeds. The project started in November 2014 and will run until July 2016.
The aim of the project is to identify how scientific knowledge relating to the topic of climate change is translated (or possibly mistranslated), across genres, and in texts accessed by young people aged 11-16 in the UK.
It involves a detailed linguistic analysis of three large language data-sets in a 1 million word corpus comprised of 1. Academic and policy texts, 2. Educational materials, and 3. Interviews with young people, all relating to the topic of climate change.
A number of methods will be employed for analysing and comparing the data-sets. We will identify the most frequent word forms in each sub-corpus using corpus software (SketchEngine), and WordSmith Tools to give an indication of the most frequent semantic themes. We will also identify key semantic areas using WMatrix.
The practical implications of this work will be disseminated in the form of journal articles targeted at science education, science communication, and specialised linguistic journals, as well as articles to quality newspapers. We will also be organising engagement and dissemination events for education professionals in the Yorkshire region, as well as a national event for curriculum developers, science journalists and policy-makers in London.