Disseminating knowledge through TED Talks for children

The present contribution focuses on a corpus of TED Talks given by children and/or taken from different TED playlists designed to share ideas with middle and high school students. To what extent are TED talks for children different from other TED talks? Furthermore, do they share similar strategies with other informative literature for children? A qualitative analysis of the verbal code and visuals in the data has indeed confirmed expectations for strategies of popularisation via general kid-oriented recontextualisation, and more specifically via exemplification, reformulation and analogy, as well as strategies of multimodal engagement through humour. A quantitative analysis and comparison with a corpus of generic TED talks (i.e. not specifically involving children as either speakers or part of the intended audience) has also helped validate and expand on the findings above. Indeed, a clearer understanding of popularising practices at work in this successful platform may be of help in fostering the development of much valued multimodal literacy skills in the contemporary digital educational scenario addressing the needs of the younger generations.