A Tribute to New York - Navarra

Pilar Santos Tambo A Tribute to New York
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Before we introduce the topic of New York, it is necessary to be aware of what our
students know beforehand. As Barr et al. say “reading starts before we even look at the
text”. We need to activate their previous knowledge, so that they can interact with the
text(s) we will be working with, and therefore, understand them better. As an example,
when I started working on this unit, I asked my bachillerato students to make a little
historic memory exercise: to think about New York before 11 th Sept. 2001 for five
minutes, in a kind of brainstorming activity. After that we put all the ideas together in a
big poster, learning at the same time to arrange ideas in a sort of mind map. The result
can be seen below.
This brainstorming and mind map allowed the class to share their previous knowledge
and it also allowed me to know what they knew about New York and what I could take
for granted. For example, I found out that they know a lot from the stereotypes they get
in films. And although some of their concepts were wrong, I think they knew a lot more
about New York than I expected them to.
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