Which method for building on background knowledge is specifically designed for English learners

​ Definition/Description: Activating Prior Knowledge is important in students understanding, because it allows them and helps make connections to the new information. By using what students already know, it helps the teacher assist students with the learning process because it give him/her an idea of what students know and what they still need to learn. It is simply to use background knowledge to make understanding of what the text mean. According to schema theory, as students learn about the world, they develop a schema and are allowed to make connections to many other things. Piaget’s schema theory make activating prior knowledge before reading essential, because according to his research when we can connect something “old” to something new it helps us better understand the new. As students are reading they are able to access their schema and make understand of the text and use their experiences. When students and teachers applied schema theory to reading comprehension readers constantly connect their background knowledge to the new knowledge in a text to help them make sense of the reading (Gunning, 2012).  

The YouTube video to the left  is demonstrating how to activate student's prior knowledge before the lesson to help them figure out what the text might be about. It also talks about how student use their schema to help them predict what the text might be about. The teacher questions her students to elicit their knowledge before. 

​​This video is for 6-8th grades for reading ELLs. This video demonstrated how to incorporate students prior knowledge to understand the text. This is important to have background information that one can relate to a text, especially when English is not the first language of the student. 

• The picture to the left demonstrates how this strategy helps students before and during reading to use what they already know and apply it to the new information/topic

Justification: This is a broad strategy that uses many different strategies and graphic organizers to help students comprehend what they read. From our text it stress how background knowledge and activating prior knowledge are not the same, but how teachers can use the prior knowledge to know what students need and build on what they know and what is from their culture (Echevarría, Vogt, and Short, 2013). This strategy helps ELLs because they all have different background, but all of their experiences can be used to help better understand a new concept.  According to text when teachers assist students in developing their background knowledge and using their experience for learning new information it helps them gain a better understand of the content, because they are able to use what they already know (Echevarría, Vogt, and Short, 2013).​

The quote above is from this video by Suzanne Clewell. In the video she describes how activating prior knowledge is not natural for students, however it is a good strategy to help student comprehend their readings. In the video she state it builds background knowledge which according to our text is critical in student literacy development (Echevarría, Vogt, and Short, 2013).​

​Purpose: To help them make connections of prior knowledge and apply it into the new material. This helps students understanding what they are reading. Since background knowledge is made up of a person's experiences with the world, with his or her concepts for how written text works, word identification, print concepts, word meaning, and how text is organized, students are constantly able to apply prior learning into the new information. 

Tips: 

• Have questions prepared to ask students.
• Use visual representations
• Model the first time
• Allow students to communicate with others and share.