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Significance of Prior 
Knowledge Activation:
A Close Look at a Bilingual 
Kindergarten Student’s  
Response to a Poem

by dr. aLma StevenSon,  
GeorGia Southern univerSity

When students come to school, they bring their 
linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds and 

the experiences they have been exposed to outside 
the classroom. When they participate in instructional 
activities, students’ backgrounds and experiences 
impact the way they perceive texts. For this reason, 
instructional approaches, wherein learning is 
conceptualized as a social process, have placed 
a central focus on valuing students’ experiences 
(Vygotsky, 1978). Within this frame, learning is socially 
constructed through interaction with people and the 
social environment, and requires the formation of 
meaningful connections between students’ previous 
experiences and sociocultural backgrounds and the 
new knowledge that is being taught. In order for this 
to consistently occur during instruction, both teachers 
and students need to cultivate such connections. 
Consequently, the activation of prior knowledge 
has become an integral part of most contemporary 
instructional approaches.
 
Prior knowledge is structured, tacit, or explicit  
knowledge an individual possesses that “contains 
conceptual and metacognitive knowledge components” 
(Dochy, De Rijdt, & Dyck, 2002, p. 267). Prior or 
background knowledge is grounded in the schema 
theory. This theory contends that the knowledge or 
schema already stored in our memory structures the 
ways in which new information, such as an unfamiliar 
reading passage, can be comprehended, interpreted, 
and integrated into our mind (Anderson & Pearson, 

1984). Therefore, new learning is impacted and shaped 
by students’ pre-existing, relevant schema. Moreover, 
their retention of new learning requires connecting it 
with this older knowledge in salient ways. It does not 
matter if students’ existing knowledge was obtained 
from experiences outside school or from instruction 
in school (Marzano, 2004); it provides the necessary 
foundation for new learning.

Detecting and Connecting with Prior Knowledge
Activating prior knowledge at the start of instruction has 
the objective of bridging the gap between what students 
already know and new concepts or topics about to be 
addressed in the classroom. Initially, accessing and 
assessing the students’ prior knowledge provides 
teachers useful measures of what students know and 
what they have misconceptions about (Alvermann, 
Phelps, & Ridgeway Gillis, 2010). Subsequently, 
connecting instruction with prior knowledge is one 
of the most important factors in promoting students’ 
comprehension, since it stimulates the students’ 
interest in the new knowledge and prepares their brains 
to form new cognitive connections between what they 
already know and their new learning. In the same 
way, the students’ linguistic background and cultural 
experiences, as reflected in their prior knowledge, can 
be used to foster understanding and opportunities to 
make meaningful associations. However, the essential 
moment-to-moment negotiations between teacher 
and students that build such connections require a 
great deal of quick, high-level thinking by teachers 

Abstract
This manuscript examines a kindergarten bilingual 
(Spanish/English) student’s responses to a poem 
during a two-day writer’s workshop. A detailed 
description of the student’s illustrated initial response 
to the poem is compared with the student’s later 
response after the vocabulary embedded in the 
poem was discussed. The importance of considering 
students’ sociocultural backgrounds and activating 
their prior knowledge as essential parts of instruction 
is stressed.



GEORGIA JOURNAL OF READING 15 VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1   2014

during instruction. Teachers need to instantaneously 
integrate social and cultural awareness, verbal and 
visual creativity, and sometimes difficult interpretations 
of students’ intended meanings.

Assessing and Integrating English Language 
Learners’ Background Knowledge
Working with English Language Learners (ELLs) 
requires teachers’ awareness of not only the students’ 
prior knowledge, but of the linguistic demands a lesson 
requires from students. Thus, it is important for teachers 
of ELLs to know specific strategies to address these 
demands and thereby assist ELLs in simultaneously 
learning content and English language skills. The 
SIOP Model (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2008), which 
is supported by Georgia’s Department of Education as 
an approach to ELL education, includes many such 
strategies. One of the most important strategies for 
making a lesson’s content more comprehensible is 
pre-discussion of key vocabulary in order that students 
can move beyond decoding individual words and 
take in the content of the larger lesson. As a means 
to this end, it is recommended that teachers use 
graphic representations and illustrations to introduce 
vocabulary words and help ELLs understand new 
content. However, to do this well, the visuals must 
make sense within students’ existing schema based in 
their cultural, linguistic, and experiential backgrounds. 
As the following example demonstrates, sometimes 
the process of using graphics and illustrations to 
assess and activate students’ existing knowledge can 
reveal unanticipated connections by the students, and 
a resultant necessity for teachers to explicitly build 
new understandings and schema as alternatives to 
what students already know.

A Close Look at a Bilingual Kindergarten  
Student’s Response to a Poem
An example of the impact of an ELLs’ linguistic and 
sociocultural background on their interpretation of a 
text is outlined in this classroom vignette extracted from 
an informal kindergarten classroom observation. The 
teacher was developing her class’s visualization skills 
by asking them to describe and illustrate their mental 
images of particular concepts or schema (Miller, 2002, 
2012). Her chosen strategy was to read a poem and 
then ask students to respond by illustrating the mental 
images they visualized while listening to the poem.

[Note that this approach is a bit reminiscent of 
McConnell’s (1992) Talking Drawings strategy, which 
was later developed by Paquette, Fello, and Jalongo 
(2007). However, in Talking Drawings, students are 
presented with a topic, asked to visualize their prior 
knowledge about the topic, and then draw that mental 
image – a guess of what is to come – all before hearing 
or reading a text (usually expository) regarding the topic.]

In the case under examination here, Ms. Furlong 
(pseudonym), a public school teacher in a small town 
in southern New Mexico, taught a dual-language 
(Spanish/English) kindergarten class wherein 
students were instructed in English and Spanish 
during alternating weeks. During an English language 
week, she presented to her students the poem Ducks 
on a Winter Night by Georgia Heard (1997). She used 
a lesson structure suggested by Miller (2002, 2012), 
as part of a two-day writer’s workshop activity. The 
poem reads: 

Ducks asleep
On the bank of the pond

Tuck their bills
Into feathery quills

Making their own beds
To keep warm in

The poem itself provides 
several opportunities for 
teaching both vocabulary 
and visualization, but it also 
contains possibilities for 
misinterpretation, some of which even Ms. Furlong 
may have not realized when starting the lesson. 
Miller (2012) emphasizes the importance of students’ 
schema as a focal point in this strategy. In Miller’s 
example, she noted that while teaching this lesson in 
her own classroom, one of her students thought that 
the “quills” in the poem referred to porcupine quills. 
Similarly, when Ms. Furlong asked her students to 
illustrate their interpretations of the poem, one Latino, 
predominantly Spanish speaking student, drew and 
described the following:
 

His picture was a clear indication of his pre-existing 
knowledge, but also his limited understanding of 
crucial English-language vocabulary: “bank” and 
“bills.” His hometown, located along the Rio Grande 
and surrounded by irrigated fields of pecan trees and 
cotton, does not have ponds with “banks” around 
them. Moreover, the distinction between the general 
category of birds’ beaks and the specific subcategory 

“bills” as dollar bills
“bank” as financial



GEORGIA JOURNAL OF READING 16 VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1   2014

of aquatic birds’ “bills” is likely not to be part of his 
experience at home or at school. This is especially 
unlikely since in everyday Spanish both beaks and 
bills are referred to by the same noun: picos. In this 
way, the natural / outdoor interpretations were not 
apparent to the student. Instead, the presence of the 
two English words, “bank” and “bills”, close to each 
other in the same poem, both of which have business-
oriented meanings, clearly facilitated a financial, rather 
than a wildlife interpretation. Thus, it is no surprise 
that he understood “bills” in its more commonly used 
sense, as dollar bills, and expected that those bills 
were connected to a commercial bank, such as is 
likely frequented by his parents.

Afterward, the teacher led an extended discussion 
and analysis of the poem, using visual representations 
to explain the poet’s intended interpretations of the 
vocabulary. She demonstrated how to choose amongst 
these alternatives on the basis of the context of the 
poem. Subsequently, the same student produced 
another, substantially different, and more accurate 
representation of the poem: 

         
This example clearly illustrates one of the crucial 
benefits of assessing and activating students’ prior 
knowledge early in any instructional activity: the 
diagnosis of misconceptions and possible linguistic, 
cultural, and experiential barriers and gaps that 
might prevent students from fully understanding texts 
(Bruner, 1986; Vygotsky, 1978). Ms. Furlong used the 
students’ initial drawings as formative assessments 
that informed her about her students’ vocabulary 
knowledge and previous experiences. She then built 
new schema that both connected and contrasted with 
their background knowledge in order to allow them to 
fully understand the meaning of the poem. Such pre-
assessments are crucial for teachers to clarify and 
connect with students’ background knowledge and 
then construct understandings of new concepts in 
relationship with what students already know.

Closing Thoughts
In summary, activating and connecting with students’ 
prior knowledge is crucial in order to optimize 
their learning. Research has shown that the most 
meaningful learning takes place when students are 
provided with opportunities and assistance to connect 
and compare new knowledge with their background 
experiences and skills (their existing schema). 
As discussed in this article, incorporating the students’ 
prior knowledge and background experiences 
facilitates students’ engagement and prepares 
their brains to connect new knowledge with their 
background experiences. In the same fashion, it is 
necessary to consider the impact of the students’ 
(especially ELLs) socio-cultural and linguistic 
backgrounds to facilitate their participation in the 
classroom. Developing the ability to assess and build 
upon students’ prior knowledge before and during 
instruction provides teachers with the opportunity to 
construct learning upon the stable foundation of what 
students already know (Bruner, 1986; Vygotsky, 1978) 
and to interconnect topics so as to reinforce students’ 
understandings. 

References
Alvermann, D. E., Phelps, S. F., & Ridgeway Gillis, 

V. (2010). Content area reading and literacy: 
Succeeding in today’s diverse classrooms (7th ed.). 
Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Anderson, R. C., & Pearson, P. D. (1984). A schema-
theoretic view of basic processes in reading 
comprehension. Handbook of reading research, 1, 
255-291.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. 
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dochy, F., De Rijdt, C., & Dyck, W. (2002). 
Cognitive prerequisites and learning how far have 
we progressed since bloom? Implications for 
educational practice and teaching. Active Learning 
in Higher Education, 3(3), 265-284.

Echevarria, J., Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2008). Making 
Content Comprehensible for English.

Language Learners: The SIOP Model (3rd ed.). 
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Heard, G. (1997). Creatures of earth, sea, and 
sky: Animal poems. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong 
Publishers.

Marzano, R. J. (2004). Building background knowledge 
for academic achievement: Research on  what 

ducks’ “bills” tucked in for sleep
“bank” as the 
edge of a body



GEORGIA JOURNAL OF READING 17 VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1   2014

works in schools. Association for Supervision and 
Curriculum Development.

McConnell, S. (1992). Talking drawings: A strategy for 
assisting learners. Journal of Reading, 36(4), 260-
269.

Miller, D. (2002). Reading with meaning (1st ed.). 
Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Miller, D. (2012). Reading with meaning (1st ed.). 
Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Paquette, K. R., Fello, S. E., & Jalongo, M. R. (2007). 
The talking drawings strategy: Using primary 
children’s illustrations and oral language to improve 
comprehension of expository text. Early Childhood 
Education Journal, 35(1), 65-73.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The 
development of higher psychological processes. 
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Once you learn to read, 
you will be forever free.

—Frederick douglass


