Background Knowledge of Students

When students enter the second language classroom, they come with varying degrees of experience with and knowledge of the language; some students may have no knowledge, some may have a bit, and other students may have a good knowledge base upon which to build. What can make the situation complicated for the teacher, is that all of these students may be in the same class together; how can we compensate for such differences? As teachers, it is important not just to realize that each student comes with their own background knowledge, but that we need to become familiar with what that background knowledge is and work with it to lead all students to higher levels of success in the target language. This section will look at the need to know a student’s background knowledge, how that background can be determined and an example of how to go about collecting this information.

Why is the background knowledge of students important?

We know that it is very rare, except for perhaps the first class, that a group of learners will all start with what we can refer to as “no background”. The minute you begin to learn a language, all sorts of individual factors come into play to contribute to that learning which force the teacher to differentiate almost immediately. However, a bigger challenge arises when dealing with students who are coming from “feeder schools”; in Alberta this refers to students who are entering either junior or senior high school and come with some previous exposure to a second language from their previous school. The feeder schools might have more or less high quality teacher proficiency, or more or less priority placed on the language program. These differences culminate in such a way that some kids who come from one feeder school might be stronger than those coming from another feeder school. It can’t be assumed that just because the students have all had the same amount of time being exposed to the language they are all on the same page.

In your opinion, what student background factors should be considered before beginning to plan for teaching?

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How do we determine our students’ background knowledge?

When you are doing planning and preparation, you should be thinking about every stage of B-SLIM. When we think about doing a “needs assessment” of students, we need to think about how this assessment is to be done, whether with a placement test, observational anecdotal notes, etc. In other words, how do you determine the background knowledge of the students? There are ways to do this, but a placement test is only as good as the number of people who use it, who developed it, and what the intended purpose was. Placement tests tend not to be used as much in elementary, junior high or senior high schools, so it is up to the teacher to get a sense of where the students are in their learning. More and more bilingual programs, for example, have discerned that in the grade 4-6 bilingual programs there are kids with a wide range of ability levels. This is in part due to the fact that within these programs some of the children are native speakers, some are more recent immigrants, some are third or fourth generation children who have heard the language and have a sense for the culture but don’t really know the language, and some have no cultural connection at all. This last group is more rare, but does exist and it is important to remember that these students are not automatically the lowest students in the group. These bilingual programs, which might have 90 students in 3 grades, have divided these students into 3 groups across the grade levels so that they are working more at their own ability level. This is an example of a case where a needs assessment of the students had been done. Usually the needs assessment shows through strongest in the oral ability.

What does needs assessments look like?

One type of needs assessment that is all encompassing is the interview format; this looks at listening comprehension, reading, speaking and writing, cultural knowledge, awareness and ability to integrate. This type of an assessment would be done on an individual, one-on-one basis with the student and take anywhere from 5-15 minutes, depending on the level of the learner. As much as this can be a challenge to organize, a second language teacher could make a very good case as to why they would need a substitute teacher on a certain day so that they can arrange to have those one-on-one meetings with students, because this is the best way for the teacher to determine the background knowledge of students.