At some point, all my English students will hit a wall in their studies. It’s rarely at the same moment, but it always has the same effect: no amount of motivation, effort, feedback or extra revision seems to make a difference to their progress.
Fortunately, I now know what to do in these situations. A few years ago, I came across a 1988 study by Donna R Recht and Lauren Leslie. The paper completely flipped my understanding of how to teach English and transformed my approach to how an English curriculum should be organised.
The research (which you can download at bit.ly/RechtLeslie) taught me that there is a hidden ingredient to reading that I had never before considered, one that works with a quiet, invisible power - rather like the yeast in breadmaking. This ingredient is the prior knowledge of the content that the reader brings to the table. And it is the key to unlocking those moments when pupils stall.
Recht and Leslie took 64 students and divided them into four equal-sized groups. The first group contained students with high reading ability and high prior knowledge of baseball; the second contained students with high reading ability but low baseball knowledge; the third involved students with low reading ability and high baseball knowledge; and the fourth had pupils with low reading ability and low baseball knowledge.
All participants read an account of a half-inning of a baseball game. Directly after this, they were asked to recall the text non-verbally (by moving figures on a replica baseball field) and verbally (by retelling the story of the game). A little while later, they were asked to summarise the game and to arrange sentences taken from the passage based on “idea importance”.
The results are highly illuminating. On all four measures of textual recall and comprehension, the significant factor was a student’s prior knowledge of baseball rather than their reading ability. Put simply, students in the high prior knowledge but low reading ability group significantly outperformed those in the low prior knowledge but high reading ability group.
This finding has a huge implication for English teachers: to understand a text sufficiently, our students require a reasonable prior knowledge of the subject material. In fact, this can even override some of the natural differences we see in reading ability.
Building from a solid base
Recht and Leslie called for a mixed approach to reading instruction: “Although direct strategy instruction makes a needed contribution, it is not enough to consider strategies without consideration of the subjects’ knowledge base,” they wrote. “In light of the importance of adequate prior knowledge, strategy instruction and the knowledge base should be equally considered in the design of instruction.”
This was an epiphany for me. For so many years, I had believed that good reading instruction consisted of teaching reading strategies (such as rereading tricky sections or making notes as you go) and teaching quite nebulous reading skills (such as inference, interpretation, analysis and evaluation). Now, finally, I understood that teaching prior knowledge was the missing piece of the puzzle. I set to work on improving my teaching immediately.
In my own classroom, this has manifested itself in two ways. First, I always preteach relevant facts and vocabulary before we read a text, especially if my students are unlikely to have encountered the subject matter before. This way, they begin to form a knowledge foundation on which to pin the reading that they will do later.
For example, before reading Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech, we will spend a considerable amount of time looking at the civil rights movement, the historical circumstances of the speech, and the more obscure political and religious allusions that King makes. Lo and behold, I have found that doing it this way prompts more insightful ideas about the text from students than ever before.
Second, I take the time to develop students’ cultural literacy. For instance, it is perfectly possible to comprehend John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men without having a working knowledge of the Wall Street Crash (the main cause of the Great Depression). However, I now know that if my students read an allusion to the Wall Street crash in a later text - a newspaper article, perhaps - they will stand a better chance of comprehension if they have some prior knowledge of this important historical event.
Recht and Leslie’s findings have had a profound effect on how I prepare students for the English language GCSE. The sticking-plaster approach of drilling exam-style questions, presenting lists of top tips and sharing last year’s examiner’s report doesn’t cut the mustard. The English language GCSE requires readers who are ready to tackle any topic - from global warming to summer festivals to animal cruelty. It requires readers with a wide general knowledge; who know that Venezuela is in South America; who understand the role of the chancellor of the exchequer; who can distinguish a mammal from an amphibian.
Good readers know a little about a lot. In truth, the whole school curriculum - yes, that includes all you science, geography and drama teachers, and you curriculum designers out there - have some responsibility in ensuring that students develop their general knowledge so that they are ready to tackle this difficult English exam.
After reading Recht and Leslie, I have worked tirelessly to encourage the leadership of my school to take knowledge acquisition seriously. We have made good progress. Teachers of all subjects now use “knowledge organisers” to support their teaching of key knowledge and vocabulary. Because of our new assessment system, students are more likely to retain this knowledge. We dedicate much of tutor time to investigating current affairs and teaching students the most effective retention strategies.
Finally, we take independent reading - the most powerful way of building background knowledge - very seriously indeed.
Andy Tharby is an English teacher and research lead, co-author of the award-winning Making Every Lesson Count, and author of Making Every English Lesson Count
