The National Curriculum Framework (2005) and other important educational documents recommend that educators try to connect what children are learning in school to their lives. In fact, this has been emphasised so much in educational reform that our brains go into the “yes, yes, we know that” mode of glossing over the over-stated.

I hope to slow us down a little, and take a closer look at the role of prior knowledge in comprehending texts in classrooms.

Why Prior Knowledge Helps Comprehension

Why should children connect what they read to their lives? The answer may appear commonsensical. Children possess a variety of information and knowledge that they have experienced in their worlds outside school. When they read, it would help with meaning-making if they brought knowledge of the world to the word. In fact, words in texts rarely present complete information for meaning-making. In a story about cats and rats, the text may say, “The cats pounced on the rats.” The text would assume that readers know it is natural for cats to pounce on rats. Texts will rarely tell the reader, “The cats pounced on the rats, because that is what cats typically do.” Texts rely on readers to bring relevant information from their knowledge of the world to make-meaning. Hence, amongst reading educators, prior knowledge has long been known to be important in aiding comprehension. Let us look a simple example.

Text: “Meera went with her parents to the mela.”

Many of us who have gone to the mela will read this sentence and imagine a little girl holding her parents’ hands and visiting the fair. We may also imagine what she sees there. We might imagine she is excited about going to the mela.

But imagine you didn’t know what a mela was. Much of this background activity in the mind shuts down, and all we could visualise would be a child going somewhere with her parents. We couldn’t figure out whether to be happy, sad or anxious for her. If mela meant “dentist’s office”, then we would worry for Meera; if it was her first solo dance performance, we would be excited and anxious for her. If it was a fair with merry-go-rounds and sweets and balloons, we would be happy for her.

Now imagine that the meaning of the word is not the problem–your teacher has explained that to you. But imagine you have never visited a mela. Would that not impact the richness of the imagery you generate?

When we read, we bring background knowledge to the text, and this interacts with the text and permits us to make meaning. Often, it helps us to fill in the gaps because no text describes everything fully.

Imagine the next line of the text was:

“Meera tugged impatiently at her mother’s hand, willing her to walk faster.”

Many of us, having been that child ourselves, might understand why the mother was holding Meera’s hand–for fear of losing her in the crowded mela. We might understand why Meera is tugging impatiently – she is eager to experience the wonderful things at the mela.

But imagine the next line read:

“Meera’s children ran ahead happily with their father, while Meera struggled to escort her elderly parents safely.”

Suddenly, the text has given us new information that makes us re-evaluate our earlier ideas about Meera as a small girl being escorted by her parents. We realise that Meera is the grown-up escorting her elderly parents.

This way, we bring our prior knowledge and expectations to the text and build ideas about what the text means. The information from the text interacts with our ideas – affirms some and changes others. In this give-and-take of ideas and information from the text, a new representation of the text is created – we can be said to have understood the text if this interaction has worked.

No two people’s understanding of the text is likely to be identical. In my understanding, I have put in all the details of the melas I attended as a child in Delhi, with gol-guppas and women dressed in their bright winter shawls, while you may have filled in details of your experiences as a child in Kochi, where you ate appam and stew and the stall owners wore mundus that flapped lightly in the welcome evening breeze. My grandmother might have filled in details of old-fashioned wooden wind-up toys we don’t see anymore and currency we don’t use anymore. These details may not be in the text. We each bring our personal worlds to the book, and in that interaction – that give-and-take between reader and text – meaning is created.

Can Prior Knowledge Hurt Comprehension?

So far I have narrated a relatively straightforward account of how prior knowledge helps with comprehending the text. Now I take a look at how it can hurt meaning-making, if we are not careful.

Imagine a child has read the third sentence about Meera escorting her elderly parents. Imagine in the child’s mind the image of Meera is unaltered – she remains a little girl going to the mela with her parents. Will that hurt her comprehension of the text?

But wait, you say, such things won’t happen, except in your hypothetical examples. In real life, most children will understand the new information given by the text, and adjust their ideas about Meera accordingly.

What if I take a few examples, then, to prove that children often fail to adjust their prior knowledge based on information from the text? These are from the Literacy Research in Indian Languages (LiRIL; Menon et al., 2017), a complete report of which you can find here.

As part of the research, we interviewed children on their comprehension as they interacted with various texts. When the children were in Grade 3, we presented them with a book called The Catty Ratty Tale (Pratham Books, n.d., https://storyweaver.org.in/stories/13700-the-catty-ratty-tale-billion-ki-dawat).

In this story, cats invite rats for a feast. The leader of the rats cautions them that cats are the rats’ enemies. He advises them to dig a hole, so that they can escape if the need should arise. The rats do as advised. When the cats see the rats, they begin to sing and dance, “Sing and dance, dance and sing, let’s catch them and eat them.” When the cats attack, the rats jump into the holes and escape.

Children were invited to look through this book and read it, and as they read it, the researcher asked questions.

Here are some examples of interactions between the researcher and different children.

TEXT:

One day, the cats called the rats for a feast. They made rice, puris and lots more food. Everybody’s mouth was watering. They invited the rats.

Researcher (R): What do you think will happen now?

Child (C): खिचडी खायला...लापशी खाया, खिचडी खाया. (Will eat khichdi, will eat lapsi, will eat khichdi.)

Example 1

What was happening here? The children belonging to the Warli tribe in this area of Maharashtra often eat khicchdi and laapsi at their feasts. The child was bringing her prior knowledge to make sense of the text. But what was not happening? She was failing to use her prior knowledge about cats and rats in anticipating what might happen next.

Here is another example.

Example 2 a & b

In each example, we see the same pattern. In the first, the child brings in her prior knowledge of snakes swallowing rats, but leaves out the everyday show of hostility between cats and rats.

In the second example, the child uses her prior knowledge about how people respond to dinner invitations, but, again, fails to take into account critical knowledge about cats and rats.

Example 3

Example 4

What is happening in these examples? Each child is activating her prior knowledge – about people singing and dancing at festivals, what is eaten at festivals, the idea that pets don’t need to hunt for their food and so on. Yet, in each case, the child failed to comprehend the text.

A qualitative pattern that we saw was that children often imposed their prior knowledge on the text, and ignored information from the text. A classic example of this is Example 3, where the cats sing out, “Let’s catch them and eat them!” yet the child sees this as ritualistic singing common in religious feasts in the region.

So, What can be Done?

It is well known in the literature on reading comprehension that some children impose their schemas (or prior knowledge) on information from the text. Such children are known as “schema imposers” (Wade, 2009). While the literature views such instances as personal characteristics of different children, we (researchers on the LiRIL project) interpret it slightly differently. We believe that this pattern is due to how prior knowledge is taught in Indian classrooms. The LiRIL researchers conducted over 200 observations at two sites over three years, as children moved from Grades 1 to 3 (Menon et al., 2017). We noticed teachers use prior knowledge in a way that makes children think about what they know about the topic; but they do not teach them to use this knowledge to make better sense of texts.

For example, when they see the word mela, teachers might ask children, what a mela is, if they have been to a mela and so on. Different children will share their experiences at the mela and the teacher will move on. However, the teacher does not point out how she is using her knowledge about melas to make better sense of the text. If the text talks about something scary happening at the mela, some children might fail to notice it, and might continue to hold happy ideas about melas. The teacher is not likely to point out the contrast between the child’s expectation and what actually happens in the text. Some children intuitively, or due to more literate home circumstances, might make the connect. But other children might never make this connect.

How might we counteract this tendency of children to impose their own ideas onto texts? From my experience with teachers and children participating in the LiRIL study, I offer a few tentative observations and suggestions.

1. Create supportive contexts for meaning-making: Emphasise that the purpose in reading something is to try to make sense of it. Many children in our study did not seem to understand that they were supposed to make meaning from the passages they read from their textbooks. They decoded the script mechanically, and then spent time copywriting word-meaning and question-answers from the blackboard. Comprehension cannot flourish in environments that don’t support it. So create a supportive classroom context where meaning-making is central. Read aloud as often as you can. Read a variety of books. Read stories worthy of discussion. Permit children to see that the reason we read is to make meaning.
2. Expect accountable talk: When you read and discuss a text, permit students to connect it with their prior knowledge. But expect “accountable talk” (Calkins, 2001). It is all right for children to make wild guesses based on prior knowledge when they predict what is going to happen. But once you finish reading a section or passage, they should not be making wild guesses! In answer to the question, “Did the cats catch the rats, or did the rats escape?” if a child says, “The cats caught the rats”, the teacher would say, “Where in the book did you see/read that? Can we all look at the book again?” You could ask children to work in pairs or small groups to verify their answers with information from the text.
3. Model for the students: As the teacher, you have to repeatedly model for children how good readers make sense of what they read. If you ask students to look for meaning in what they read, you will have to show them how you do this. If you ask them to verify their answers with the text, you will need to show them how you do this. And help them understand which kinds of prior knowledge is useful for making sense of a text, what good readers do when what they expect is different from what the text says is happening; and which cues from the text we consider in assisting us with meaning-making.
4. Balance talk about text and life: When you ask children to connect texts with their lives, sometimes they offer relevant information; at others, they may take the group off on interesting tangents. For example, there might be the picture of a baby in the book, but the baby may not be central to that story. A child may choose to narrate a long story about a baby she or he knows. As the teacher, it is upto you to balance talk about text with talk about children’s lives. As Calkins puts it, any book-based conversation in which the book has evaporated completely from the discussion should alarm you as a teacher. Bring the children gently back to the text. You could say, “It is nice of you to share that, but let us continue reading and see whether the baby is important to this story.”  At the end of a story, you could ask children, “How is this story we’re reading similar to (or different from) your experience?” This will help children distinguish between their lives and what they read about. If you keep directing children back to the text, over time the idea that responses should be justified from the text will occur to the children without your prompting them.

Reading comprehension is only an extension of children’s ability to make sense of their lives. We connect the dots and make inferences in our daily lives. If you hear a crash in the kitchen and no one else is in the house, you might conclude that the cat knocked something over (if there is a cat in the house). But when you go into the kitchen, you might notice that your brother has come in through the back door and knocked something over. You revise your interpretation, given the new information. Children do this instinctively and from an early age (van dan Broek, 2017).

When we enter textual worlds, we carry our ability to make inferences and seek meaning with us. Many children from literate households learn the how the world of texts is similar to, and different from, the world outside texts from an early age. They know when to transfer understandings from the world to the word, and when not to. However, this world of texts and words is not as familiar to first generation learners. The culture of being literate must be made transparent to them.

Ultimately, reading comprehension does not lie in children making rich and varied connects with their prior knowledge, but in using this knowledge selectively and sensibly to make a defensible construction of the text. That is something we must not forget as we encourage children to connect texts to their lives.

References

Calkins, L. (2001). The Art of Teaching Reading. Addison-Wesley.

Menon, S., Krishnamurthy, R., Sajitha, S., Apte, N., Basargekar, A., Subramaniam, S., Nalkamani, M., & Modugala, M. (2017). Literacy Research in Indian Languages (LiRiL): Report of a Three-Year Longitudinal Study on Early Reading and Writing in Marathi and Kannada. Bangalore: Azim Premji University; and New Delhi: Tata Trusts.

National Council of Educational Research and Training (2005). National Curriculum Framework for School Education. New Delhi.

van den Broek, P. (2017).  Developing reading comprehension interventions. In E. Segers and P. V. Broek (Eds.). Developmental perspectives in written language and literacy.  John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Wade, S. E. (1990). Using think alouds to assess comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 43 (7) , pp. 442-451.