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Robert J. Marzano: A question that sometimes comes up is "How is vocabulary related to background knowledge?" It's not obvious at first, but if you think about it a little bit, there is a strong relationship. Vocabulary is really just a name for the terms that we have that are labels on our experiences. And, fundamentally, that's what vocabulary is.

If you don't have vocabulary for a content area, you don't know the content area—and that's what opens the door for us. We can actually build background knowledge by directly teaching certain vocabulary in a certain way.

—An excerpt from Building Academic Background Knowledge, an ASCD video-based professional development program.