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Building Background Knowledge

Building background knowledge is essential to ESL lessons. Many of our students lack the necessary scaffolding to create deep meaning, so ESL activities are critical.

Students learn best when new content is linked with past learning and experiences.

The differences we see in reading comprehension for our ESL students is due to their schema.

Schema is culturally specific. When the meaning of the text is not part of a particular reader's cultural background, the schema is skewed.

We must structure our ESL lessons to fit our students existing schema.

But what happens if you, as the teacher, don't know much about the backgrounds of the different students?

What if the family, cultural, and religious experiences of your students, including English language learners, are vastly different from your own?

What if your students cannot make any connections to your lessons?

How can you connect ESL activities to something that might be completely foreign to you?

Ask and Listen for Background Knowledge

Ask and then listen. The open-ended questions are simple enough: How many of you have ever...? When have you...? Tell about a time when you felt...?

An experience shared in a five-minute quick-write can reveal connections to a scientific process, a historical situation, or a literary theme.

Give yourselves credit for your capacity to highlight, focus, compare and link student sharing with the ESL lesson plans; you already are building background knowledge all the time anyway.

Even beginning English language learners want to share their experiences. Use ESL activities to encourage them to use quick sketches, arrows, or simple pantomime to express ideas. If they get stuck, suggest a word supported with a sketch or gesture of your own. In a quick-write, concentrate on the ideas, not the spelling or grammar. Help students share and connect.

Within the diversity of shared student stories is the common thread of living for all of us. By tapping into those past experiences, you stimulate clear connections between the lesson and the students themselves.

Background Knowledge: Previous Learning

When you build a good house, you start with a strong foundation. Students learn best when they can connect new information to previous concepts, vocabulary, strategies and activities from earlier learning experiences.

When your students come from a number of feeder schools, not to mention different school districts, states and countries, it's sometimes difficult to know where to begin a lesson.

Academic vocabulary and concepts learned in another language are just as valid as those learned in English, but school curriculum in other countries may have a different focus.

ESL lesson plans require building background knowledge support within ESL activities and core lessons, especially for American history and American culture.

Critical for Refugee Students

Refugee students may significantly lack background knowledge and skills due to interrupted schooling. English language learners who miss out on critical phonic or computational skills when they first arrive in America may require ESL lesson plans that provide extra reading or math support later.

Teachers have to determine what background information and learning strategies students already have, and then provide support to fill in any gaps.

To assess previous learning, some teachers use short, formative written or oral pretests.

Others utilize student-centered journaling or interactive class discussions as part of their ESOL lesson plans.

As learning gaps are found, ESOL teachers may provide or display simplified materials from previous lessons.

These should be in the form of visuals, vocabulary graphic organizers, outlines, maps, essential word lists and time-lines.

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