The ELL Whisperer
  • Home
  • Parents
  • Emergency Aid
  • Strategies you can use now
  • English Magic
  • PREMIUM
  • For ENL teachers / Worksheets and other resources
  • Tip of the day
  • Important Acronyms
  • Videos and Songs for your smartboard
  • Routine for Newcomers
  • ELL Testing Accommodations
  • Need Help?
  • Dictionaries
  • Parts of Speech
  • NYSESLAT
  • Donors Choose: Learning English Through Movie Magic

Building background / schema
Activating Prior Knowledge

If a student doesn't know a thing about basketball, it is going to be exceptionally difficult to comprehend a reading passage about a basketball game.  A student who comes from a different country may have had vastly different experiences than we have had.  We must build their background knowledge before we dive into a lesson or read a passage.  

Some ways to build background: 
Visuals
Videos
Go on a field trip
Virtual Field Trips

We must also activate prior knowledge before we dive into a lesson.  Make a connection to prior lessons or connect a lesson to the students' lives.  One way to do this is to use an anticipation guide.   Before students read a passage, or before you teach a minilesson, the students respond to statements about the subject matter.  An agree or disagree activity or a true or false activity.

Another way to activate prior knowledge is to use a KWL chart.  What do we know about this topic already? What do we want to know?  After the lesson, what did we learn?

You could even ask the students to respond to a few questions that start with "What would you do...?"   

Before an ELA minilesson, have the students respond to a do now question in which the students must make a prediction about what the character will do next, and ask them why they think the character will do that.  Have them base their answer on what the character has done previously.

Here is a video from teachingchannel.org about activating prior knowledge.  It also demonstrates a great activity for teaching active listening.

​You can read more about background knowledge here.

​You can read more about front loading vocabulary here.


ELL Whisperer, 2021
​All rights reserved.
  • Home
  • Parents
  • Emergency Aid
  • Strategies you can use now
  • English Magic
  • PREMIUM
  • For ENL teachers / Worksheets and other resources
  • Tip of the day
  • Important Acronyms
  • Videos and Songs for your smartboard
  • Routine for Newcomers
  • ELL Testing Accommodations
  • Need Help?
  • Dictionaries
  • Parts of Speech
  • NYSESLAT
  • Donors Choose: Learning English Through Movie Magic