Connecting the Theories with Concrete and Vicarious Experiences
Traditionally, reading instruction has concentrated on during-reading and after-reading activities. As a result reading “instruction” has often been largely focused on reading assessment. Pre-reading instruction is often overlooked by teachers. Pre-reading instruction sets the stage for students to comprehend texts. Since schema plays an important part in reading, help your students develop enough prior knowledge to understand the texts they read.
Prior knowledge is a combination of the knowledge that students bring to the table and the knowledge that you provide them during pre-reading activities. An important part of pre-reading activities is to assess your students’ prior knowledge on the subject they will be studying. Once you have a baseline to work from you can fill in the blanks. With many subjects you will have to provide the information, but in other cases you may find that a class is already knowledgeable about the subject. In fact, there may even be one or two students who are experts. As a teacher, you could build the classes’ collective knowledge, by encouraging students to share their personal experiences.
Prior knowledge can be developed through:
- Concrete experiences
- Vicarious experiences
Concrete experiences are first-hand experiences that involve all the senses. Going to the zoo is a concrete experience.
Vicarious experiences are secondhand or indirect. These experiences include reading books, looking at photographs, watching videos, and listening to conversations.
The best instruction combines both approaches. Before the field trip, students had the vicarious experience of reading about zoo animals. This prepared them to understand more about the animals as they had the concrete experience at the zoo. When the students reread the books and used metacognition, the concrete experience at the zoo helped them to fully comprehend the meaning of the texts.
Children tend to be very inquisitive, so providing concrete experiences with vicarious reading is a great way to motivate students to read. As students relate their own experiences to the books they read, they will begin to comprehend more. In the next section we will look at how vocabulary affects reading comprehension.