D_ y_u kn_w wh_t I me_n? Reading for inference
D_ Y_U KN_W WH_T I ME_N? READING FOR INFERENCE Clare Sealy
Inference, says Clare Sealy, isn’t a skill that can be taught. But it can be improved – through knowledge.
I’ve always found it much harder to teach how to infer meaning than how to decode. With decoding, there’s a clear route map. Some children may take a bit longer to travel that route; but if you stick to the path, in the end you will get there. But with inference…some children just get it and some really, really don’t. And when they don’t, it’s really hard to move them on. Why is this? Having been intrigued and perplexed about how best to teach children to use inference in their reading for many years, I decided to find out what research said about the subject. What I found out was somewhat surprising. According to Daniel Willingham, the cognitive scientist, it seems that inference as a skill doesn’t really exist. That might explain why it’s so hard to teach! Willingham explains that inference is more of a trick than a skill.1 With a trick, once you know it, you won’t get any better by practising it over and over again. Skills, on the other hand, improve with practice. Willingham says that when we teach inference, what we are really doing is teaching children to connect ideas, filling in the missing bits the author has left out. Authors always leave bits out; they don’t explain every last detail – just like when we speak, we make certain assumptions about the person listening, assuming they already know stuff and so can join the dots. The difference is that when we talk to someone, we monitor to see whether they are understanding us. We will look at the person we are speaking to from time to time to check for signs that they understand. The person listening will give us some useful feedback, maybe nodding or saying ‘mhm’ or ‘uh-huh’ – what linguists call giving ‘acceptance signals’ – to show 6
June 2019
they get it. If we have assumed too much and the listener doesn’t understand, they will send us a signal by saying something like ‘huh?’ or by looking baffled. This is our cue to provide more detail. Books just don’t care whether we understand what they are saying or not. They don’t monitor our acceptance signals (even though we might nod along as we read a set of instructions) and they certainly don’t rephrase what they are saying if we exclaim ‘huh?’ So the first thing we need to teach children about inference is their own crucial role in checking they are understanding what the text is saying as they read. The book isn’t going to stop and repeat itself or explain in more detail if they don’t understand. Successful readers expect to understand what they read and know what to do when they spot themselves not understanding. Successful readers don’t just read the actual words on the page; they also check that these strings of words make sense. And if they don’t, successful readers stop, go back and reread to try to fathom out what the writer is trying to say. If children have never seen this process modelled by a teacher, then how would they know that this is what they should also be doing? Teachers need to use ‘thinking out loud’ to show how they check for meaning as they read.
The first thing we need to teach children about inference is their own crucial role in checking they are understanding what the text is saying as they read.
