Building Background Knowledge to Improve High School Students’ Literacy Skills

Poor reading skills for older students are a problem: On the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), nearly 70 percent of eighth graders scored below proficiency on reading. While this data is bleak, the good news is that there is so much high school content area that teachers can work with to be a part of the solution by using the science of reading framework.

One of the best ways high school teachers can support struggling readers is to actively build background knowledge with students. As Natalie Wexler writes in The Knowledge Gap, “The most important factor in determining whether readers can understand a text is how much relevant vocabulary and background knowledge they have.”

High school teachers likely have many resources to teach vocabulary, but what does it mean to build background knowledge? What does this actually look like? Here are three strategies that guide my planning as a high school English and history teacher when I think about building background knowledge with my students.

Tap into Students’ existing knowledge 

Our first step as teachers hoping to build stronger readers is to tap into students’ existing knowledge. In her article “Building Knowledge,” Wexler notes that “knowledge, like Velcro, sticks best to other related knowledge.” As teachers, then, our task is clear: We must activate the knowledge that students already have in order for them to be successful readers in our classes.

Our students are not blank slates and do not live in a vacuum. When they enter our classroom, they bring with them their full lived experiences. We must help them make sense of new information and new texts by connecting them to what they already know, what they have already experienced, and what is already on their “hard drive.”

For example, in my civics class last fall, my students were reading the Supreme Court case Shelby v. Holder. To tap into their existing knowledge, I first had them discuss themes of equity, voting access, and historical racism through a human barometer activity. Kids had not yet read the case, but they had a lot to say on the major ideas of equity that the case presented.

I never ask students to read a challenging text without first tapping into what they are bringing to the text, such as through an anticipation guide, a K-W-L Chart, or a four-corners discussion. Further, I love creating quick writes for students with prompts that challenge them to find connections to what they already know and then share those connections with their peers in a wraparound discussion.

Explicitly build new knowledge

Our next step to help build strong readers is to explicitly build new knowledge—more “Velcro” for other knowledge to stick to.

Last year, I worked with a science teacher to build new knowledge with students around watersheds. The students, although they live a few miles from the Lake Champlain watershed, had never heard the term before. My colleague found three short videos about watersheds, their importance, and risks threatening them, and then used the see-think-wonder protocol for students to track their new knowledge. The result? Students had “connective tissue” for their new learning to stick to.

In addition to using short videos to build knowledge, I often rely on text sets. Before students read our core text, such as the Shelby v. Holder decision, we first read shorter, often easier, related texts to provide students with context for their new learning. In this scenario, we read a short news article about the case, an opinion piece on the impact of the decision, and watched a short video. Throughout this exploration, students used a semantic mapping tool to help them hold on to their new background knowledge.

I also frequently use gallery walks with both photographs and short quotes to help build knowledge before students read a core text, and chalk talks with excerpts of short texts posted on large poster paper, where students respond to the text.

Read a lot to build knowledge

Finally, and relatedly, the best thing we can do is to simply increase the volume of reading. Using texts to build knowledge is so important because reading a larger volume of texts strongly corresponds with building vocabulary, knowledge, and overall reading achievement.

In my U.S. History course, when we study the Great Migration, we read a variety of texts to help students fully understand the context in which thousands of Black people left the South. My students read picture books to elementary school students, excerpts of young adult nonfiction and historical fiction, and a variety of secondary sources from historians.

As a result, students not only have a ton of background knowledge about the conditions leading to the Great Migration, but also have vocabulary, connections, and anecdotes to help them access core texts in our unit. A text-rich classroom built on the themes and topics of the unit is common in elementary classrooms but is often lost in high school classrooms. By giving students a chance to read ample texts on the same topic, we give them the opportunity to build their knowledge and thus become stronger readers.

In addition to reading a variety of texts, I have used Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week strategy for years to help students read relevant, contemporary texts related to themes or ideas in our history course. As a coach, I frequently encourage teachers to think about what their core text is and then build a set of other texts around it, including shorter ones. You can use a jigsaw method or a choice board to offer more options for students.

Explicitly building background knowledge with our high school students is key to building their academic success in our classrooms and helping them grow as readers. Without background knowledge, students will continue to struggle with hard texts. With these three strategies, high school content area teachers can be part of the solution.