What is factual knowledge for world language instruction?

[Laura]

In Daniel T. Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School, he begins by emphasizing the importance of the interplay of procedural memory, sensory input, and working memory. He goes on to explain how factual knowledge stored in longterm memory, familiarity with the subject, is more useful to reading comprehension than even interest in the subject matter.

Willingham: "If factual knowledge makes cognitive processes work better, the obvious implication is that we must help children learn background knowledge."

What "background knowledge" means in other academic areas is typically pretty obvious, and how it relates to WL may come up as I keep reading, but I'd like to get the PLN perspective on this one.

Is background knowledge literacy skills like skimming and context clues? Is it culture? Is it cognates and vocabulary? Is it--dare I say--grammatical structures?

My guess based on personal experience would be vocabulary and using context clues (which may include sentence structure and exposure to a variety thereof). After a certain level, I'd say cultural and idiomatic awareness enters into the equation too.