ABSTRACT
Our brains are phenomenal machines, complex, interactive, and powerful, capable of feats that computer scientists can only dream of at the moment. Our brains are constantly bombarded by input from our senses, and from this information we form memories. Robert Marzano, author of Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement, defines a word as " the label associated with a packet of knowledge stored in permanent memory". These packets of knowledge are what he refers to as background knowledge. Every person's kitchen schema certainly will not contain the same details: there will be cultural differences, experiential differences, socioeconomic differences. Vocabulary instruction is everybody's business. In all subject areas, students need to learn a specialized language: the language of mathematics, the language of science, the language of music, and so on. In addition to the specialized terminology that might be found in the glossary of a subject area textbook, we have a general level of language for academic conversation.
