Building Context, Text, and Disciplinary Knowledge

Every teacher knows that prior knowledge is essential in order for students to connect to the new information they are learning.  I learned a strategy in my ESL training called Realia.  This is an attempt for teachers to build background knowledge when it doesn't exist in order to give students a greater chance to succeed.  For example during my ESL summer institute my co teachers and I created an thematic unit about desserts.  We live in the dessert so some students have a pretty good idea about what a dessert is however, it gets cold here and we have mountains.  It is not the typical desert you think of when talking about deserts.  In order to bring Realia into the classroom you bring in all 5 senses.   The students need to see, hear, taste, touch and smell.  We created 3D models that looked like a desert, they had animals that would live in a desert as well as plants, and dirt.  Students ate cooked cactus, and looked at pictures and small models  or real life things that would be in a desert.  In the book they explored prior knowledge and the importance of it.  They even went as far as discussing what prior knowledge was expected in certain text.  This made them the reader more aware of what they were reading and who the audience was intended for.  If they didn't have prior knowledge about a topic the discussions with the classroom helped.

Not only is content knowledge important, the knowledge about the way text is set up is even more important so that the reader can easily follow what is being read.  Schoenbach used several strategies with her students in order to help them understand the importance of prior knowledge.  One strategy she used was Ambiguous headlines.  The model is as follows: (Schoenbach, 1999, p.101)

Materials

Newspaper headlines that can be interpreted in more than one way (for example: "Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers," "Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should be Belted," "Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years in Checkout Counter," "Kids Make Nutritious Snacks," "New Vaccine may Contain Rabies," "Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years," and "Miners Refuse to Work After Death").

Procedure

-Have students copy down an ambiguous headline.

-Ask them to write what they believe to be an improbable but plausible explanation based on a literal reading of the words. 

-Ask them to write what they believe to be the correct explanation of what it means.

-Ask them to write an explanation of the schema necessary to understand the correct meaning.

This entire chapter is made up of activities that would work in the classroom in order to help build knowledge.  Some activities include: Give one, Get One, Cloze Passages, Survival Words, Trees (Graphic Organizers), and New Portfolio Project.  I wish I could type all of the strategies out so that you could use them in your classroom.  I will be using many of these strategies in my classroom.