It seems obvious but I’ll state it anyway: we read things to understand them. If students can’t understand what they’re reading at school, they will struggle to cope with the curriculum. Show
Reading comprehension is complex, but, according to the Simple View of Reading, it is the product of two proximal variables: word recognition and language comprehension skills. To understand what we read, we need lots of skills, including:
What do we mean by “background knowledge”?Background knowledge is all the world knowledge a reader brings to the task of reading a text (Smith et al., 2021). It includes events, facts, procedural knowledge (how to do things), as well as related vocabulary (Kintsch, 1998). Some researchers call it “prior knowledge”. Background knowledge about specific or defined fields, like engineering, medicine, or law, is often referred to as “domain knowledge” (Alexander & Jetton, 2000). Let’s use an example to illustrate how background knowledge may affect reading comprehension. Consider this excerpt from a Wikipedia article on American Football strategies (a topic I know very little about): “Despite the multi-receiver sets, the spread option is a run-first scheme that requires a quarterback that is comfortable carrying the ball, a mobile offensive line that can effectively pull and trap, and receivers that can hold their blocks. Its essence is misdirection.” What’s my background knowledge here? (This will be embarrassing!) I know American Football is a popular team sport in the US, and I know some Australians play it, too. I know about quarterbacks, and Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from watching the news. I know how the field is laid out in a grid – hence the term gridiron. In the 1980s, I watched some terrible TV movies that involved American football. I’m aware of the annual hoopla about the cost of Super Bowls ads. I watched a Super Bowl with some American friends on TV when I worked for a US Investment bank, although I had no idea what was going on. I know about scoring touchdowns. A high school friend used to play an American football game on his PC, so I know about setting for offensive and defensive plays. Way back in 1997, I even watched part of a high school football game in Rochester, Minnesota, although all I remember is lots of waiting around and my hosts being very focused on statistics. What else do I know that might help me to understand the excerpt? I know about “misdirection” from my failed attempts to be a magician at around 10 years of age. I know the ordinary meaning of each word in this excerpt. What don’t I know? I have no idea what some of the technical terms mean in context (e.g. “run-first”, “pull and trap”). Nor do I know exactly what the words mean together because of my ignorance of how plays in the game are determined. I can get a rough idea – the gist – of the passage by drawing on my knowledge of other football codes, such as Rugby League and Aussie Rules. But the truth is, I lack the background knowledge to understand the simple-to-read passage fully. In a comprehension test, I would do fine with questions that required me to look back and find answers. I would have more difficulty with questions that required me to understand unstated details or to draw inferences about football. My comprehension of the passage would certainly lag that of a regular American football viewer. And I had to work much harder to access and recall things than would someone who has watched games recently. Reading research shows that background knowledge about a topic may assist the reading comprehension of older school-aged children and adults when reading about the same topic. Recent research suggests that higher levels of background knowledge on a topic may, to a degree, also boost young school-aged children’s reading comprehension of a text on the same topic – although background knowledge levels appear to affect stronger and weaker readers differently (Smith et al., 2021 – see below). So background knowledge may help improve reading comprehension. But we must take care not to overstate its effects for two main reasons: Caveat 1: background knowledge is just one sub-component of one element of the updated Simple View of ReadingThe cognitive foundations framework, developed by Hoover & Tunmer based on the Simple View of Reading, recognises that background information and inferencing skills are sub-components of language comprehension. However, both the Simple View of Reading and the cognitive foundations framework model state that: Reading comprehension = word recognition x language comprehension. The models predict that, if word recognition is very poor, then reading comprehension will also be poor regardless of background knowledge because:
Background knowledge may also not be sufficient to compensate for poor oral language skills – especially if the reader cannot understand the words used in the text (language content), process the grammar used in the text (language form), or understand the conventions of type of text they are reading (language use), or simply not understand the questions they are being asked to probe their comprehension (e.g. questions containing academic words). Caveat 2: Students struggle with reading comprehension for lots of reasonsLimited background knowledge about a topic may affect comprehension. But it’s important to remember that multiple factors – alone or in combination – explain why many students struggle with reading comprehension, including: Astute readers will note that these caveats say the same thing in two ways: don’t overestimate the effect of background knowledge on reading comprehension, especially while students are learning foundational word recognition and language skills. So what does the research evidence say?To most people, it seems obvious that people will understand what they read better if they already know lots about the topic of the text. But things are more complicated – especially when you consider some of the technical research about Cognitive Load Theory, and primary and secondary knowledge. For older students, we know that:
In a recent critical review of peer-reviewed studies, Smith and colleagues looked at the effects of background knowledge on the reading comprehension of middle-to-late primary school-aged students (Smith et al., 2021). The underlying evidence base is really messy, in part because of different definitions, assessment tasks, and outcome measures used in different studies. But the researchers found that, in general:
How might background knowledge help reading comprehension?Having a vast store of quickly available, previously acquired knowledge enables the mind to take in new information in less time and with less effort and to link it to existing knowledge (Hirsch, 2003). Background knowledge may:
Why is the discussion about the teaching of background knowledge so controversial?It’s a mystery to me. Before I trained to become a speech pathologist, I thought that everyone believed that we should teach school-aged children lots of facts about the world in a methodical, logical, and systematic way. I was wrong. Some people think knowledge is overrated and that students can Google facts if and as they need them. Others think that children learn knowledge best by following their interests and natural curiosities, rather than learning facts from expert teachers in a sequenced, structured way. Yet others seem to think that parents should be responsible for building knowledge outside of school hours (which seems a little unreasonable, especially for many families with histories of communication issues and families from low socioeconomic backgrounds). Some researchers think that young students – especially in the early years of school – spend too little time reading non-fiction, information-based texts (e.g. Danilow et al., 2013; Palinscae & Duke, 2004). Other researchers think that some teachers focus too much, for too long, on comprehension strategies and generic skills like critical thinking, and not enough time imparting knowledge about the world (e.g. Catts & Kahmi, 2017). For example, we know that there are no additional benefits to reading comprehension performance after around fifteen hours of instruction in generic comprehension strategies (e.g. Elleman, 2017; and Stevens et al., 2019). Needless to say, not everyone agrees! What we do know is that, as readers develop, they need more advanced reading strategies to cope with the curriculum, especially for specialised areas of the curriculum like history, science and maths, where domain knowledge (a subset of background knowledge) is very important (e.g. Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008 and 2012). How can we improve a child’s background knowledge? Free resources and tipsHere are several suggestions and resources, many of which are completely free:
Some examples of full programs that integrate reading and knowledge content instruction Clinical bottom lineTo improve a child’s reading comprehension skills, foundation skills training based on the Simple View of Reading is essential. We go into what this entails in much more detail here. Systematic knowledge-building is not enough on its own to compensate for poor reading skills. But background knowledge can help students to learn new information more efficiently, including when reading, and to understand how the world works. In this article, we’ve highlighted a number of resources to help parents and teachers help children to increase their knowledge of the world around them. We hope they are helpful! Principal sources:
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