10-second review: “The apparent discrepancy between the language and ideas in the text and the prior knowledge and language of the students creates major instructional problems for the teacher and major learning problems for the students.” “Because of life’s experiences, every learner can make some link with a new topic of study.”
Title: “Facilitating Text Processing: The Elaboration of Prior Knowledge.” JA Langer, pp. 149 -162. Reader Meets Author/Bridging the Gap. Ed. JA Langer and MT Smith-Burke. IRA. 1982,
Comment: The more you know about the topic, the more you will understand what you read about a topic. If the topic is remote from the students’ experience, then the teacher needs to build students’ background knowledge leading to their anticipating what they will learn from their reading. This background information can be stimulated by pictures, by quotes, by questions eliciting related experiences and conclude by surveying the chapter: title, sub-title, bold-face headings, first paragraph, first sentence of each intermediate paragraph, last paragraph and formulating question to answer when reading.
The teacher needs to begin by learning what students know about the topic. One time I taught a science class on the circulatory system as a demonstration for a 7th-grade science teacher. When I asked the students what they already knew about the topic, both the science teacher and I were amazed at what they had already learned about it from previous classes in the elementary schools. They knew so much that there was almost no need for reading the chapter. After surveying, they formulated four questions and quickly found the answers. All you have to do is ask in order to determine how much background students have about the topic. RayS.
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