Conceptual change and causal relations

Abstract Throughout the conceptual change approach, the subject-specific concepts of students, represented as ideas and knowledge structures about scientific phenomena and their changes through teaching-learning processes, are explained. Extensions related to mathematical and biological phenomena have already been made. The fact that learners also have subject-specific concepts in relation to language, which exist as assumptions, beliefs, ideas and changes, is often implicitly assumed in language didactics research but has not yet been systematically investigated as conceptual change. Thus, both the sufficient modeling of language-related concepts, as is the case in scientific research, and the empirical testing of selected language phenomena are lacking. In this article, the two perspectives dominating the (natural) scientific discourse are outlined to subsequently model conceptual change for language reflection and categorization in the context of a secondary analysis of causal relations. The focus is on the question of which basic ontological and epistemological concepts students have and how these can be operationalized. This is connected to the fundamental question of whether conceptual change can be used as a possible explanatory approach for changing subject-specific concepts in language learning processes.