"You Really Expect me to read all that Latin!" - Strategies for Reading Latin Texts
by Caroline Kelly, Covenant Day School, NC
III. The Concept of Prior Knowledge
We may begin with two quotations from an excellent overview on the website from the Project Better Series, A Summary of Current Research on Thinking and Learning, on the School Improvement in Maryland website. (This site is a highly recommended resource for information all aspects of teaching and learning, and in particular for the attention given to reading strategies.)
“PRIOR KNOWLEDGE can be explained as a combination of the learner's preexisting attitudes, experiences, and knowledge.”1
“Prior knowledge (in the form of schemata) influences our comprehension to a much greater degree than earlier research would have suggested....So powerful is the influence of prior knowledge on comprehension that Johnston and Pearson have found that prior knowledge of topic is a better predictor of comprehension than is either an intelligence test score or a reading achievement test score.”2
Although these excerpts are from articles on reading English, they are valid for understanding how we make meaning out of a passage in any language. Teachers of Latin can encourage their students to tap consciously into such prior knowledge, offer them strategies to bridge the gap successfully from old to new knowledge, and so help them make the new knowledge their own. This concept is especially valuable in the middle school environment where the cognitive maturity of students may not have reached the level where they can comfortably manipulate abstract grammar concepts—without an apparent context—and then applying them to a passage. Research does seem to indicate that students at this age very much need hands-on experience of making meaning—which stories can provide. Pre-reading is a way of scaffolding the complex task of reading, and a way of providing students with a sense of accomplishment in small tasks as part of the whole.
There is much more that could be said both on Prior Knowledge theory, and Middle School strategies, but at this point in the ACL workshop, participants were offered time to reflect on how to incorporate pre-reading strategies into a chapter in Ecce Romani, Book I, to decide what prior knowledge they thought their students would, and/or should bring to this reading.
1 Strategic Teaching and Reading Project Guidebook. (NCREL, 1995, rev. ed.).
2 Anderson, R. C. and Pearson, P. D. (l984). A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension. In P. D. Pearson (Ed.) Handbook of reading research.
