Unlock author Sabina Ostrowska joined us to discuss the importance of world knowledge to students’ language learning, and how we can use it to develop their skills.
Sabina defined world knowledge as essentially what we learn over the course of our lives, both formally and informally, about particular cultures. When learners are reading, it can help them predict new information, guess new words from their context, and generally lessen their cognitive burden.
When learners are writing, world knowledge helps them find a subject and develop a more balanced argument. Teachers can build upon learners’ existing knowledge by providing them with related reading and listening materials, then eliciting key vocabulary from those materials, before brainstorming ideas.
For video listening tasks, giving students snapshots from the video before they watch it can usefully help them to predict the content to come. Depending on their level, you can spend time eliciting relevant vocabulary either before or after the task itself.
World knowledge can also help learners with speaking tasks, lowering their fears of speaking, increasing their fluency, freeing them to focus on the language rather than content, and increasing their motivation and interest in the topic.
Sabina shared a great many ways of encouraging and developing learners’ world knowledge, including learning new facts together, listening to what your students already know, and using photographs to facilitate discussion.
For more ideas, and to watch the webinar in full, press play on the video below. You can read more from Sabina here.