In this short video tutorial, we'll be discussing the KWL chart, and we'll also be discussing how
to fill out a KWL chart based on a reading. So, let's start with the basics of KWL. So, what is
a KWL chart? A KWL chart is basically a way to improve your reading comprehension and other
English skills as well. How does KWL help you?The main focus of a KWL chart is the improvement of
your reading comprehension skills. So, that's the main thing that KWL helps you with. However,
it also helps you with writing, the grammar, and vocabulary because as you'll see when we discuss
how to fill out a KWL chart we have chances to practice writing and grammar and vocabulary.
This is what a KWL chart looks like. You'll be filling out these KWL charts for the reading
assignments in this class. So, first of all we have the article title. Right here is where we'll
type in the article title. Whether it's a book or a newspaper or a academic journal article,
we type the title in this space. Then, we can see three columns, the 'What I know' column,
the 'What I want to know' column, and 'What I learned' column. So, we can see that KWL stands
for 'Know,' 'Want to know,' and 'Learned.' So, what we do is before we read the article,
we fill out these two columns: 'What I know' and 'What I want to know.' After
we've finished reading the article or the text, we fill in the 'What I learned' column. So,
after we finish filling out the three columns for the KWL then we go down here
and then we write the author's main idea or the writer's main idea in one sentence.
Let's take a look at this article that we'll do a KWL chart for. So, this is the article called,
"The Ape in the Office." So, this is the the title of the article, so we know that we want to type
that into our KWL first. We can also take a look at some of the pages and look at the pictures that
we see throughout this article. So, we have a picture of a gorilla here. It looks like it's
angry or yelling. Then, we can actually go to the next page, and we can see another picture of
a person man yelling at other people. Maybe it's a boss or a manager. We can also see another picture
of a gorilla here, looks like he's touching his chest or pounding his chest. He looks like he's
maybe excited or something. We can also take a look at some of these headings here. For example,
we see 'Cooperation Versus Conflict,' 'The Value of Networking,' 'The Importance of Hierarchies,'
and 'Limits of Aggression. So, maybe we don't know all the meanings of these words, but that's okay,
we can still fill out our KWL based on what you already know. Ok, here we're back at our
KWL chart, and we're going to start filling this out based on the article called, "The Ape in the
Office." So, the first thing that we want to do is type in the article's title which is "The Ape
in the Office," and then we can fill out some of these columns. We can start with 'What I know.'
Now we remember we took a look at the article, kind of skimmed it, we didn't read it really,
but we looked at the pictures, so we know that this this article is going to be something about
maybe gorillas or monkeys, so just based on looking at the pictures and this title "The
Ape in the Office," we can kind of explain what we already know about this topic. Ok, so now I filled
out the 'What I know' column. I've started all my sentences with 'I know that' so I've said 'I know
that gorillas and monkeys are related to humans in some way.' 'I know that humans and some monkeys
have similar behaviors.' 'I know that gorillas and some monkeys can use tools like humans.' So,
we're just writing down anything we know about this topic or the topic we guessed the reading
is going to be about. Of course, you can do more than just three. You should write
as much as you know about this topic or what you think this topic is going be about. Next,
we'll fill in 'What I want to know.' Now remember that we still have not read the article yet. We've
just skimmed it. We've looked at the pictures, but we have not read the article in detail yet. So,
here under 'What I want to know,' we're going to write five WH questions and one yes/no question
at least. You can do more if you'd like to for more practice, but we want to ask questions about
the article, for example, questions about what we think the article is going be about or maybe what
we want to learn from the article just by looking at the pictures and the title. Okay, here we have
the what I want to know column filled with our questions so I've written several WH questions
as well as one yes no question about what I want to know from reading this article. I don't know if
these questions will be answered after I read, but it's something that I want to know about,
so I've asked these questions. We'll find out if these questions are answered of course when we
finish reading the article. Again, you can write more than just seven questions you can write let's
say seven WH questions and three yes/no questions. It's totally up to you, and it's just totally up
to you as far as how much practice you want to give yourself in writing questions. So,
the next thing we do is we're going to take time to read the article very carefully, and
after we've read the article, that's when we'll fill in 'What I learned.' Okay, so now that I've
finished reading the article called, "The Ape in the Office," I filled out this last column in the
KWL under 'What I learned.' So all the information here I've learned from the reading. This is stuff
that I didn't know before. What I did was I filled out different sentences here. I started
each sentence with 'I learned that' and then I included the information that I learned from the
reading. Now, I only did three here, but you can do and should do five or more. You can do five,
six, seven; you can do twenty if you like. You can write, type on the back of this KWL,
or extend the column so that you can have as many pieces of information that you want to include.
One thing that you have to make sure that you remember is that all the information that you
write in this' 'What I learned' column should be from the from the reading, but it should
be in your own words. In other words, I don't want you to copy sentences from the article.
You can copy ideas, but you need to write those ideas in your own words using English obviously,
and after you've finished 'What I learned,' in this column, you can move on to the very last
thing which is the author's main idea which you write in one sentence. For this article, I wrote
one main idea sentence about the entire article. So, here I wrote 'In the article,"The Ape in
the Office," the author explains that both humans and other primates have similar social rules. So,
this part of the sentence is the actual main idea, 'both humans and other primates have similar
social rules,' but I also included this kind of introduction to the author's main idea by adding
'In the article, "The Ape in the Office." That's the title of the article, and then 'the author
explains that.' So, this is kind of a formula that you can use to introduce your main idea
sentence. Now remember that this one sentence is the main idea for the whole article not one
paragraph or not two paragraphs but the entire article, and that's how we fill out a KWL chart