Since images have been used in many contexts, it is important to investigate multimodality and its educational applications. Thus, we investigate to what extent multimodal texts about science are able to improve children's scientific education in Brasil. To accomplish our aim, we analyze 'Ciência Hoje das Crianças', an online publication by 'Instituto Ciência Hoje'. The texts from 'Ecologia e Meio Ambiente', the analyzed section, suggest that their images allow the reader to recognize/visualize unfamiliar concepts, events, elements and/or beings. Based on this result, we can say that there are two basic functions attributed to these images: they put the reader in contact with the scientific knowledge expressed, partially or abstractly in verbal language, and they portray the scientific explanation already expressed in verbal language. The multimodal reading seems to be demanded as a requirement to enable the reader to understand the whole of the information.
Language; Text; Image; Multimodality; Children scientific education
