Background Knowledge
Knowledge begets knowledge — students draw upon what they already know to master new vocabulary and content. The articles in this section discuss why background knowledge is so important and offer ways to build this knowledge.
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Adolescents and Literacy: Reading for the 21st Century
This report reviews and analyzes existing research on effective literacy instruction and the impact of successful literacy programs for students in grades 4-12.
Connect Students' Background Knowledge to Content in the ELL Classroom
As you teach content areas to ELLs of diverse backgrounds, you may find that they struggle to grasp the content, and that they approach the content from very different perspectives. Drawing on your students’ background knowledge and experiences, can be an effective way to bridge those gaps and to make the content more accessible. This article offers a number of suggestions to classroom teachers as they find ways to tap into the background knowledge that students bring with them.
Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents
Alvermann, D.E. (2001). Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents. Oak Creek, WI: National Reading Conference.
Literacy must be redefined for the Net Generation. Strict print literacy in a subject area does not prepare students to respond to today's increasingly complex communications. Instead, literacy must be considered multi-faceted, and include hypertext and visual. Furthermore, the framework of literacy instruction must be reconsidered: what does struggling mean, how can digital literacy be transformed into academic literacy and the reverse. For today's adolescents, literacy instruction must be sensitive to multiple interrelated factors, including motivations and self-perception, and it must be embedded in the subject matter.
How Knowledge Helps
The author, a professor of cognitive psychology, notes, "it's true that knowledge gives students something to think about, but… knowledge does much more than just help students hone their thinking skills, it actually makes learning easier." Factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes like problem solving and reasoning, and once you have some knowledge, the brain finds it easier to get more and more knowledge.
Pre-Reading Activities for ELLs
Pre-reading activities may be designed to motivate student interest, activate prior knowledge, or pre-teach potentially difficult concepts and vocabulary. This is also a great opportunity to introduce comprehension components such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, personification, main idea, sequencing, and others.
Still At Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now
(2008) ©Common Core. All rights reserved.
This report reveals some damning statistics about U.S. teens' lack of knowledge of history and culture. For example, one-third do not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom of speech and religion and forty-four percent think The Scarlet Letter was either about a witch trial or a piece of correspondence.
The authors' attribute much of this ignorance to a curriculum focused on basic reading and math skills and preparation for high-stakes testing, but parental educational also has an impact on student knowledge-students with a college-educated parent scored significantly better than those without.
To Read or Not To Read
National Endowment for the Arts. (2007). To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence. Washington, DC: Author.
The National Endowment for the Arts assembled data on reading trends from more than 40 sources— federal agencies, universities, foundations, associations— to present an overview of American reading. Among the negative trends revealed: Americans are reading less and less well, and the progress in reading ability made at the elementary school level disappears when children become teens.
Use Easy Nonfiction to Build Background Knowledge
A Texas librarian shares his strategy of using nonfiction picture books to introduce new concepts to struggling adolescent readers and to build their background knowledge. Once students have been exposed to academic content in easy reading material, they are more confident in making the transition to textbooks.
