Popularizing the Covid-19 pandemic to young children online: A case study

This study applies the notion of popularization to assess how the Covid-19 pandemic is explained to young children. The analysis is carried out on two corpora: texts providing advice to parents on how to talk to their children about Covid-19, and texts aimed directly at children. The research is informed by studies on specialized knowledge dissemination, medical and scientific popularization and health literacy, contributing to the growing body of research on popularization to children. All corpora contain texts in English, with smaller subcorpora of Italian and Russian texts to provide contrastive remarks, where applicable. The findings focus on definitions of key concepts and on their metaphorical framing, including reliance on the pre-existing knowledge of children realized through similes. The quality of popularized materials for children (and their caregivers) is problematized on account of several misconceptions introduced in definitions. Finally, it is argued that personification is the most frequent and distinctive strategy of popularization to children, as opposed to texts targeting their parents relying on a wider range of popularizing strategies, and could be added as a separate category to the existing theoretical framework.