Activities for tapping prior knowledge are typically designed for use before reading activities, but we have used the ones listed here to also help students access writing, speaking, and listening tasks. Students write and share what they already know about the topic in the K What I Know section.
They then add questions in the W What I Want to Know section and write their learnings in the L What I Learned section as they uncover new information through written and digital texts.
They are often organized as a list of statements which students have to agree or disagree with. This can be done in writing or speaking. It can be helpful to have students revisit their anticipation guides at the end of a unit in order to reflect on changes in their thinking and in preparation for writing an essay.
So, what does all this mean for language learners — what kind of prior background knowledge do English language learners bring with them to their English classes?
Well, of course learners bring with them all kinds of knowledge of the world, all kinds of cultural and factual information based on their previous experiences and interests, but they also bring with them lots of knowledge of language — learners at all levels have some previous English knowledge, but more importantly, they bring with them huge amounts of first language knowledge and this cannot and should not be ignored in a language teaching situation.
Learners are going to use this knowledge of their first language to help them to learn another language. Why would we want to give learners a task that is impossible for them to succeed at? In this example Figure 1 , we see how learners think and talk about the topic before they read, but also learn or review some of the vocabulary that is in the text, such as, volunteer.
Because of the history of the development of the Spanish, Portuguese and English languages there are a tremendous amount of words that are cognates, or have similar meanings across the languages. Knowing that learners already know Portuguese or Spanish allows us also to take advantage of their prior knowledge by predicting what mistakes they will make based on the typical mistakes that Spanish and Portuguese speakers of English make.
Figure 3 shows an example of this. We saw this already in the example of public places above in Figure 2 where learners learn new vocabulary based on knowledge of words in L1 and then go on to learn new semantically related words.
In Figure 4 we see this principle related to learning a new grammar structure. Therefore, we need to find ways as teachers to help learners to constantly review information that they have learned. A simple and very effective way to do is by practice testing. Research has shown for over years that practice testing is one of the least expensive and effective teaching techniques for improving learning.
Practice testing can even take the form of a game. Look at the activity in Figure 5. In the last fifty years, the fields of cognitive science, psychology and, more recently, neuroscience have offered teachers great insights into how human learning takes place. Notify me of new posts via email. Blog at WordPress. Home About. Background knowledge vs. Prior knowledge April 27, Share this: Twitter Facebook.
Like this: Like Loading Keeping your brain healthy!!! Dan Reynolds permalink. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Dan Reynolds on Background knowledge vs. Current research on learning suggests that learning is determined by what the learner already knows about the topic or related topics Svinicki, If the pre-existing knowledge is correct and consistent with the new information, the effect on learning is positive.
However, if prior knowledge is full of misconceptions, or conflicts with new information, the effect on new learning can be negative. Ambrose et al. Select one of the tabs below to learn more about each type of knowledge. Students do not always automatically draw on prior knowledge.
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