Meaning Skills
Background Knowledge

Background knowledge (or background information) also influences comprehension. A skilled, fluent reader who knows a lot about American history, for instance, will have an easier time understanding a passage about the Civil War than a reader who does not bring such background knowledge to the reading. We usually gain much of our background knowledge when we are children and adolescents in school.

Many of the adults in literacy programs, however, have not had this opportunity because either they could not read texts well enough in middle and/or high school to take advantage of information or they dropped-out of school by the ninth or tenth grade. Nonetheless, they have gained some information associated with school curricula from personal interests, educational television, while on the job, and through interactions with peers.

As accomplished readers, we are often not aware of how much understanding of what we read comes from the knowledge we bring to the text. "Reading comprehension is ... the process of 'constructing meaning' from a text. Comprehension is a 'construction process' because it involves all of the elements of the reading process working together as a text is read to create a representation of the text in the reader's mind."^RR The more prior knowledge we have of the subject presented in a passage, the richer will be our understanding. Prior knowledge of a subject forms a framework (schema) into which additional ideas can be assimilated and remembered.

A reader's comprehension of a passage will be increased if information about the subject content is talked about prior to reading - with two aims in mind:

1. To develop learners' awareness that reading comprehension is an interactive process by asking them to think about what they know about a subject before, and as, they read a passage. "Thinking about what you know" is a metacognitive activity important in all areas of learning. Poor readers who need to devote metacognition to decoding words may not realize that a similar approach is necessary to understand the words in the connected text; they expect the meaning to come from the page. As readers become aware that the meaning of a passage lies between the author and the reader, they will engage in the "cooperative" metacognitive activity necessary to understanding written text.
   
   
2. To increase learners' store of knowledge beyond their experiences.

Two formal assessments of the kind of general information that is usually acquired in school are:

• Information subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Survey (WAIS)
  
  
• Academic Knowledge (Science, Social Studies, Humanities) subtest of the Woodcock-Johnson - III

To see how background knowledge can affect comprehension, click here to view a sample passage.

Click here to go to "Silent Reading Comprehension" next.