A novel approach for enhancing student reading comprehension by activating prior knowledge

Reading is an important skill for gaining knowledge and discovering new information in a global society. Reading competence also strongly influences a person’s learning ability. However, in building better reading skills, one of the major difficulties is an absence of background knowledge to help learners read and understand material. Background knowledge helps learners make connections to construct clues within the text and determine the meaning of new vocabulary or sentences. Often, learners lack a mechanism to help them construct prior knowledge, preventing them from fully understanding their reading. To cope with these problems, this study adopts one of the most popular Web 2.0 techniques—social tagging—to help learners both read and understand English articles. We test our approach using a tag-based collaborative reading learning system. Our conclusions demonstrate the approach’s effectiveness, and reveal areas for future research.