In order to study for citizenship tests, amnesty students need to be able to read U.S. history material, although they usually have no background knowledge for it. According to schema theory, background knowledge is important for reading comprehension. Research has shown significant improvement in the reading comprehension of intermediate level English-as-a-Second-Language students as a result of the provision of appropriate background knowledge. To discover whether the provision of background knowledge would help beginning-level ESL students, beginning-level amnesty students were tested. The provision of appropriate, multisensory, background experiences on Abraham Lincoln for the experimental group resulted in statistically significant improvement in reading comprehension, as shown on a free written recall test. The control group received multisensory experiences irrelevant to the test. Differences in syntactic complexity of texts used in the tests were insignificant. Lesson plans on Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. are included. Eight appendices include charts, texts, tests, scoring criteria, and scripts for slides. (Contains 54 references.) (Author/KM)