Background Knowledge:
Key to Comprehension
Parents
might think twice about letting their young children spend much time in day
care. It can literally stunt your child's intellectual growth. Why? Because
your child will hear mostly one-syllable words, not very well pronounced, spoken
by the other small children, and will not pick up very many new complex words,
because the adult speech will be very limited as well, to "crowd control" and a
minimum of one-on-one communication.
It's
certainly a lot easier to build vocabulary and a knowledge base when a child is
reared mostly in the home, with an adult mother and father interacting with the
child with complex speech, lots of reading aloud, shared personal experiences
and observations, and lots of time for relaxed questioning and discovery.
It
is the vocabulary and "background knowledge" that a young child brings to
kindergarten which can make the difference between high achievement in
learning, and a so-so school career. Why? Because of the immense difference
that a large vocabulary and body of knowledge make in the development of good
reading comprehension in a child. The time to build that vocabulary and
background knowledge is in the early years of childhood.
Children
with larger vocabularies get ahead, and stay ahead, as they continue to build
their knowledge base in breadth and depth on top of that strong early
foundation. Children with a slower start have a hard time ever pulling even,
much less excelling.
Although he doesn't necessarily
pooh-pooh day-care for young children, reading expert and psychology professor
Dan Willingham of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville is passionate
about helping children develop a rich base of background knowledge so that they
can excel in school. Willingham, who writes a column for American Educator, said that without background knowledge to
compare text to, a beginning reader can only gain a shallow, surface
understanding of the text. With no basis for comparison, the child won't be
able to do the mental operations necessary in reading to be able to truly
comprehend the text.
By the time children can decode
written words fast enough to absorb what they mean, it's about fourth grade. So
if they haven't built up enough background knowledge from their environment -
mostly from listening to adults - they are handicapped for reading
comprehension beyond about the fourth-grade level.
Willingham said that college freshmen
typically know about 60,000 words, but few people learn more than about 400
words per year via vocabulary lists in school. So by far most vocabulary that
people know is acquired indirectly, and a lot of that is from the words they hear
in their homes.
Willingham, author of Cognition: The Thinking Animal, said, "If
we're concerned about having students who are good readers we have to recognize
that reading is an interaction between the words on the page and the knowledge
in the reader's head."
For
more about Willingham's work, see http://www.prenhall.com/willingham/
