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I m p l e m e n t i n g R T I W i t h E n g l i s h L e a r n e r s
How many moles of chlorine gas (Cl2) would react with 5 moles of sodium (Na) according to the following chemical equation? Na + Cl2 NaCl
While frontloading can occur in Tier 1, quality core instruction, it is more often conducted with small groups of students based on identified needs. As can be surmised from the student examples above, not all students need frontloading, and spending valuable instructional time providing this support for all students would not be wise. For our purposes here, it is important to remember that not all English learners will benefit from frontloading in a given lesson; teaching is based on what students already know and understand—not the fact that they’re learning English. Having said that, English learners require frontloading more often than native speakers of English because of the language demands of school. Background Knowledge
As noted in the experiences of the three students introduced in the opening of this section, background knowledge varies tremendously. Background
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takes place. In psychology, this concept is known as priming. Traditionally, priming is thought about in terms of the impact that one stimulus has on reactions to future stimuli. A classic example of this process involves showing people an incomplete sketch and slowly revealing more of it until they recognize the picture. Later, these people will identify the sketch at an earlier stage than was possible for them the first time (Kolb & Whishaw, 2003). Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept of priming in his book Blink (2005). As one example, Gladwell relates the study of two Dutch researchers who had two groups of students each answer forty-two Trivial Pursuit questions. One group was asked to take five minutes to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write it down, while the other group was asked to do the same with soccer hooligan in place of professor. The students who thought about professors ended up getting 55.6 percent of the questions correct, while the soccer group got 42.6 percent correct. In education terms, we think of this method as frontloading. While the psychology experiments are often conducted in relatively short time spans, frontloading is done over hours or days. In general, frontloading involves strategically preteaching the background knowledge, vocabulary, and language structures students need to comprehend the lesson (Harper & De Jong, 2004). Of course, there are situations in which the entire class requires frontloading. For example, our chemistry and physics colleague Maria Grant recently frontloaded her students on the concept of stoichiometry (the quantitative relationship between reactants and products in a chemical reaction) because her assessment data suggested that they needed it. There are very few students who have experience with these kinds of tasks: