K-W-L: A Teaching Model That Develops Active Reading of Expository Text

TLDR

Prior knowledge is essential for reading comprehension, yet classroom practices often overlook eliciting students’ existing knowledge before instruction. The study aims to develop a procedure that helps teachers honor students’ prior knowledge before reading nonfiction texts. The procedure involves teachers eliciting students’ background knowledge and modeling appropriate knowledge sources before reading, applicable at any grade level and content area. Teachers reported that the procedure’s simplicity made it easy to implement and encouraged active reading.

Abstract

Prior knowledge is extremely impor tant in influencing how we interpret what we read and what we learn from reading (Anderson, 1977). To read well, we must access the knowledge we already have about the topic, or make it available appropriately so that comprehension can occur (Anderson and Pichert, 1978; Bransford, 1983). Despite the research highlighting the importance of this prior knowledge and many calls for more interactive teaching, the reading scripts used for teaching children to read in schools too often ignore the importance of what the children bring to reading. Teachers are instructed to begin by telling chil dren the gist of what they are going to read about and why they should read this particular information. Even when there are directions for teachers to find out what the children already know about the topic, teachers often over look this instruction. As Durkin's classroom observations demonstrated (1984), the most neglected part of reading lessons is that which instructs teachers to elicit children's background knowledge. To help teachers honor what chil dren bring to each reading situation and model for their students the impor tance of accessing appropriate knowl edge sources before reading, we have developed a simple procedure that can be used with nonfiction selections at any grade level and in any content, whether in reading groups or in con tent learning situations. We have found that the simplicity of instructional demands on them makes