Contextual knowledge is an essential aspect in the complex process of reading and is a significant impediment to lots of our disadvantaged students with low reading ages. With a reduced exposure to reading and a lack of cultural capital, approaching new texts can be a daunting prospect for many novice readers. As mentioned in the previous blog, building a detailed mental model is vital for precise comprehension of a text. This can be further complicated when approaching academic texts tailored to the precise needs and skills of the wide variety of subjects students engage with at school.
Every subject has a disciplinary language, specialised content, and a unique skillset to demonstrate expertise. Disciplinary Literacy formalises this as an understanding that each subject wants their students to speak, think and read in a particular way. The expertise required for success across all these disciplines necessitates students being able to not only have a broad knowledge base but a capacity to judiciously select the relevant contextual knowledge at the right times.
We recognise the difficulty of this in our subjects and provide students with multiple types of reading opportunities to enhance their understanding of our subject’s discipline. However, given the pace we demand of units of work and the specialised content of each lesson, are we sure that every student’s situation model matches ours when they read in our lessons? Just because the text offered is situated within a unit and the fact that it explains a concept relevant to the lesson objective does not mean all students can bring the contextual information expected to fully comprehend the text.
Referring to the working model of memory further reinforces the need to strengthen and consolidate contextual knowledge before reading a text, especially an academic text with specialist requirements. As the function of the working memory is limited, providing our students with texts that have challenging language, academic sentence structures, disciplinary reading foci, complex and often interlinked content to comprehend, expecting students to independently bring their entire knowledge base from the subject and their wider contextual knowledge is likely to provoke cognitive overload. Whilst there are ways to tackle reading comprehension with active reading skills, ensuring the students have brought relevant contextual knowledge to the foreground of their thinking reduces the burden of tackling the text significantly.
Questioning students on relevant prior learning and setting them to complete pre-reading activities that situate the text within a wider narrative they are familiar with, provides students who have not yet developed expert reading skills an environment where they can feel success.
Further to this, it is important that as a reading experience, the texts we are providing students should be deliberately developing a contextual knowledge which will later be relied on. Once understood, it needs to form the contextual knowledge for future reading. As such, framing our reading and compartmentalising the reading activity within a schema is imperative if we want our students to be able to retrieve this information at suitable points later. Without this we may find, as I have previously, that students reading analytical essays misapply knowledge and try to analyse voltas and caesura (poetical terms) within plays and novels.
With context being so important in the comprehension of texts, the upcoming blog will begin to explore some strategies that can be applied within lessons.
References:
Podcast – 32. Reading is Learning: Breaking Down the artificial barrier with Natalie Wexler
Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5 – 51. https://doi.org/10.1177/152910… (Original work published 2018)
BBC Bitesize (2019). Migration Trends. [online] Available at:
https://www.bbc.com/bitesize/g… [Accessed 26 Jun. 2019]. 25. Perfetti, C. and Stafura, J. (2013). Word Knowledge in a Theory of Reading Comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), pp.22 – 37. DOI:10.1080/10888438.2013.827687
