Att röra sig mellan konkret och abstrakt språk : En interventionsstudie om hur undervisning baserad på semantiska vågor kan främja elevers förståelse av abstrakta begrepp

Sammanfattning

The aim of this study was to investigate how a teaching intervention based on semantic waves within Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) could support pupils´ understanding of abstract concepts and how their use of concrete and abstract expressions was manifested in written responses before and after the intervention. The study was conducted in a Year 6 class and was inspired by design-based research. Data were collected through a pre-test, a teaching intervention and a post-test. The pupils worked with the concepts experience, sacrifice, characteristic, cause and demand. The theoretical framework was primarily based on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), particularly the concepts of semantic gravity, semantic density and semantic waves. The sociocultural perspective was also used to understand learning as something developed through interaction and language use. The results showed that several pupils developed a deeper understanding of the concepts after the intervention. The most noticeable progression appeared in the concepts sacrifice, cause and demand where pupils also demonstrated an increased ability to move between concrete examples and more abstract explanations, which could be understood as semantic movements within LCT. In contrast, the concepts characteristic and experience proved to be more challenging for the pupils compared to the other concepts. At the same time, some pupils still relied mainly on everyday and context-bound expressions. The study concluded that teaching based on semantic waves could support pupils´ concept understanding by creating connections between everyday language and more abstract school language. The findings also indicated that explicit teaching where concepts were unpacked through concrete examples and repacked into more generalized explanations could contribute to pupils´ language and knowledge development.