The Construction of Field in Science Popularization Stories

Abstract

Systemic Functional Linguistics proposes a model of language that views texts as context-situated social activities. Context is modeled into two levels: context of culture which accounts for variation according to genre, and context of situation which accounts for variations according to three dimensions: field, tenor and mode. The register variable field, understood as the way in which a particular domain of experience is construed and organized through ideational meanings, is explored in a corpus of science popularization stories. The aim is to understand how science as a social activity is represented in these texts and to gain insights on how this approach can be useful in English as a Foreign Language reading courses in university environments. One component of the Rhetorical Structure (Presentation of the Popularized Research) is selected to identify entities, activities and qualities through an analysis of Transitivity. Taxonomies are constructed related to the following entities: researchers, institutions, research reports, and research. The results show how the fields of doing science and reporting science are construed in this component through the description of those entities and the activities they are involved in. Pedagogical implications are suggested in relation to the design of pedagogical materials in EFL university reading courses.