Word meaning and conceptions. An empirical study of relationships between students' thinking and use of language when reasoning about a problem

In considering students' thinking, thephenomenographic tradition has paid considerableattention to conceptions of various phenomena withinthe context of learning. However, this research hasnot explicitly examined the relation betweenwords used and their meaning in the processes of understanding and learning. The present study concernsthe character of the relationships between verbalexpressions and thoughts about phenomena referred to.In order to understand these relationships more fully,an empirical study was carried out. Twenty-sevenstudents from two institutes of higher education, acollege of health science and a college of education,participated. Qualitative interviews were used to bothstimulate students' thinking about the conceptionsthey expressed of a particular problem and to documenttheir thinking. Contextual analysis was used toexamine this data. The results of the analysis arepresented in three related descriptive categories. Thecategories represent three different aspects ofrelationships between words used and thoughts aboutphenomena referred to and three different developmentsof these relationships. Finally, conclusions are drawnand are discussed in relation to research onunderstanding and learning and two major traditions inthe philosophy of language.

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