Attitude Resources of Appraisal Theory in Popular Science Articles

Increasing growth of technological advances has made it inevitable for the public to be engaged in the outcomes of science. On the one hand, the public are interested in obtaining research findings and on the other hand, the scientists like to share their feelings about their discoveries with the public in order to achieve a wider range of audience. These all have brought popularizing of science to the fore within the last few decades. The current study aimed to explore the frequency of attitude resources of Appraisal theory in English and Persian popular science articles (PSAs hereafter) in the field of Nutrition. A total of 80 English and Persian popularized articles published in four English popular sources and two Persian popular sources were analyzed in terms of attitude resources of Appraisal Theory The results of the analysis of English and Persian popular science articles in terms of attitude resources demonstrated that the authors of both groups of popular science articles had higher tendency to use attitude resources. Among Attitude subcategories, appreciation resources were the most frequently used ones by which the authors tried to present their evaluation of products, processes and entities. With regard to the other two subcategories of attitude resources, the authors of English popular science articles tended to use more affect resources followed by judgment resources while their counterparts included more judgment resources followed by affect resources in Persian popular science articles. Moreover, nosignificant difference was observed between English and Persian popular science articles considering Attitude resources. The findings indicated that the authors of PSAs tend to insert their feelings about their discoveries through employing attitude resources. The results might be used to include attitude resources in EAP materials in order toprepare the would-be scientists with useful devices in order to meet the expectations of their intended non-scholarly audience.

کلیدواژه ها:

Appraisal Theory ، Attitude ، Affect ، Appreciation ، Judgment ، Popularization