Teach-Reading-and-Writing-Issue-21

T E ACH I NG T E CHN I QUE S www.teachwire.net | 9 Children are drawing inferences all the time, so why is it such a struggle when analysing texts? asks Rachel Clarke W e make inferences all day long – often without realising it. For example, if one of your children comes into the classroom after playtime with a grazed knee and clutching a wet paper towel, you will likely infer that they fell over on the playground. Equally, if your colleague says she has a headache and asks you for a tablet, you will infer that she needs the medicine to help ease her pain. Two everyday inferences. One that requires us to take our knowledge of grazed knees, the power of the wet paper towel and experience of the rough and tumble of the playground to build a big picture of what likely happened. And another, smaller, inference where we connect two words (headache and tablet) to use our understanding of what Making CONNECTIONS a tablet is and how it will help our colleague feel better. Our children make these everyday inferences, too. Just think how many times they look out of the window, see the rain and ask you if they’ll get to go out to play today. They’re making connections based on the available information and their previous experiences of what happens to playtime when it rains. They are experts at making everyday inferences, and yet when we ask them to answer inference questions about the texts they read, they find it somewhat more challenging. So, what can we do to help? Sarah and she are the same person; the drink alleviates Sarah’s thirst . The reader also needs to understand that information from across the sentences should be linked. There’s a further challenge in this story, in that if you’re not too sure about the pronouns she and her , you may struggle to connect them correctly to Sarah and her mum . To help children who may struggle with making these small, local inferences. I would take the following steps: • Tell the story in your own words. • Identify who the characters in the story are. • Circle the words that connect. • Draw arrows between the connecting words showing how the information flows back and forth. • Talk about how the key information is in more than one sentence. The local level In the first instance, let’s take a look at those smaller inferences, which are sometimes called ‘local inferences’. As with the example of the headache and the tablet, these are connections that, as experienced adult readers, we hardly register that we are being asked to make. But at a very small, local level, all reading requires such inferences, which many of our children struggle to make. Here’s a short ‘story’: Sarah was thirsty. She asked her mum for a drink. There are two main vocabulary connections that the reader needs to make to comprehend this story: “The reader also needs to understand that information from across the sentences should be linked”