Working with Information Wheels is a way of giving students a venue in which they can take chances by verbalising their suppositions about new information. By interacting with material gradually – in chunks – we compensate for the cognitive load, and so the anxiety level that often arises in the face of new information, is reduced significantly. All of this with the finality of helping our students to build a strong foundation of academic language and so more confidence in verbal communication. Students process information through positive transfer. This happens when the learner uses past experiences to affect learning and performance in a new situation – a person transfers knowledge from one place to another. You’ll see that the dynamic of the Information Wheel is to hide and reveal information at specific points in the activity, with different terms removed each time. This creates the necessity for students to remember, negotiate, infer, and use dialogue, to be able to fill in the missing words that to the best of their ability.
