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Combs, B. (2012). Assessing and Addressing Literacy Needs. USA: Sage.

Dougherty Stahl, K. A. (2014). Fostering Inference Generation With Emergent and Novice Readers. The Reading Teacher, 67(5), 384–388. doi: 10.1002/trtr.1230

Johansen, D. & Cheery-Paul, S. (2014). ‪Teaching Interpretation: Using Text-Based Evidence to Construct Meaning. Heinemann

McTigue, E., Douglass, A., Wright, L., K., Hodges S., T., & Franks, D., A. (2015). Beyond the Story Map: Inferential Comprehension via Character Perspective. The Reading Teacher, 69(1), 91–101. doi:10.1002/trtr.1377

Mills, K. A. (2010). Floating on a sea of talk: Reading comprehension through speaking and listening. The Reading Teacher, 63(4), 325-329. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/203280508?accountid=12528

Pennell, D. (2002). Explicit Instruction for Implicit Meaning: Strategies for Teaching Inferential Reading Comprehension. William & Mary School of Education. Retrieved from http://education.wm.edu/centers/ttac/documents/packets/inferential.pdf

Serafini, F. (2014). Exploring Wordless Picture Books. The Reading Teacher, 68(1), 24–26 doi: 10.1002/trtr.1294

Picture Books Cited:

Melling, D. (2010).  Hugless Douglas. Sydney: Hachette

O’neill, A. (2002). The Recess Queen. Scholastic Press.

Thomson, B. (2010). Chalk. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish.

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This is a web-based resource focusing on eight comprehension strategies (using prior knowledge, making connections, questioning, visualising, inferring, summarising, evaluating, and synthesising). Students can learn about the strategies and then try them out with online texts. After a student chooses a reading strategy, for example, inferring, students are then exposed to texts in text message, a historical photo, a blog, and letters from pen pals. Before students practicing the strategy themselves, they are to watch a instruction video about how to use it.

Combs (2012) notes technology as a useful tool with engaging and interactive nature to support building students' comprehension skills. Here, as students attempting making inferences, the animations and the sounds are working as aids for them to complete tasks.

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Into the Book is a multimedia package designed to improve elementary students' reading comprehension, as well as their ability to think and learn across the curriculum. For Grades 2-5.

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Metacognition Think Sheet

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Metacognition Think Sheet

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This Metacognition Think Sheet is in line with instructional intervention - Think Aloud - for improving reading comprehension (Combs, 2012). It is also noted by Combs (2012) that Think Aloud assists readers to understand what she/he is reading and also apply comprehension strategies include inferential thinking when reading. Those verbs: thinking, wondering, noticing, seeing, feeling and understanding explicitly help students to reveal the thinking process. Students can be guided to complete a thinking sheet of a section of text and then to return to the beginning to circle out the specific words/illustration that help them to make inference. After reading, students could be supported to make a list of the cues in the text that prompted their use of inferential thinking.

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You Oughta Know.... Metacognition and FREEBIE!

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Metacognition Think Sheets to improve reading comprehension.  TeacherKarma.com

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Metacognition Think Sheet

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Metacognition Think Sheet

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This set of Inference Task Cards includes a statement, a picture and an inference question on each card. Pennell (2002) recommended using simple sentences for students to practice making inferences. After reading the short statement on each task card, students are able to draw on their background knowledge to answer each question. For example, on the task card 2, the statement is ‘Ethan noticed that the flower in the vase was starting to droop’ and the question is ‘why might the flower be drooping?’ Students then can refer to their own experiences and might come up various answers: the flower needs water; the flower needs sunlight; the flower has fully bloomed and starts withering.  Once the students get a hang of it, they can also be guided to create their own Inference Task Cards, making sentences and generating questions that require inferential skills to answer.

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These inference task cards are perfect for beginners! Each task card includes…

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Wordless picture books 

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Wordless picture books 

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Wordless picture books offer abundant benefits for readers, including developing inferential thinking skills and can also bridging readers over to more sophisticated graphic novels and multimodal texts (Serafini, 2014).

Since no textural support available, when reading the wordless picture books, readers need to entirely base on the sequence of images and their background knowledge to infer characters’ thoughts and feelings as well as creating possible narratives. The teacher’s role here is using questions to prompt students to integrate personal experiences and emotions with pictures to make inferences and create cohesive plot events (Dougherty Stahl, 2014).

For example, in the wordless picture book Chalk by Bill Thomson, questions that provoke and guide students’ inferential thinking could include following but are not limited to:

•      Why does the rainy weather clear up and the sun come out?

•      Where do the butterflies and the dinosaur come from?

•      Why does it start raining again?

•      Where does the dinosaur go? Why did the dinosaur melt?

•      Why did the boy draw rain with the chalk to make the weather change?

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This activity could be an extension from using the Multiple Perspectives Chart.

For this activity, students take turns to be one of the characters in a picture book and to be ‘under the spotlight’ answering audience’s questions. The rest of the class is to form questions to ask him/her about the feeling or the thoughts he/she bears in the plot and the reasons behind his/her actions.

Such activity with a dramatic arts touch can provide students opportunities to go beyond the text and use inferential skills that connects what they have read to their background knowledge and experiences to identify characters’ emotions and motivation, to recall the details of the plot and to provide their own interpretations (Mills, 2010). It can also provoke a robust discussion among the children about the messages that the author want to convey (Johanse & Cherry-Paul, 2014).

Here I use the picture book The Recess Queen by Alexis O’Neill as an example. The characters that students under the spotlight need to portray are Jean, Katie Sue and a random child on the playground respectively. Through proper guidance and prompts, students are able to draw on their own experience at recess, combining it with evidence they can locate in the story (either text or illustration) and to see a clearer picture of the network of relations among characters, that is, during the recess, the children avoided Jean and did not want to play with her because she was bossy and mean, but Katie Sue invited her to play, which was quite a surprise to her and then she decided to be nice.

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In order to gain a better understanding of a narrative,  it is important to look beyond sequence plot events and to explore characters' complexity, which requires readers to tap into their inferential thinking skills (McTigue et, al. 2015). As an alternate graphic organiser of the traditional story map, this Multiple Perspectives Chart offers students opportunities to consider perspectives of various characters. It also provides a great visual for young students to compare and contrast characters’ feelings and perspectives (Johanse & Cherry-Paul, 2014).

In the shown exemplary chart, I use picture book Hugless Douglas by David Melling as an example to elicit students’ understanding of how characters’ think or feel. On the top, it states a plot event ‘Douglas wants a hug’ from the book , the students are to describe in the thought bubbles what each character is thinking or feeling. Then, the students are to provide evidence from text, illustrations or their own experience to explain their inferences.

As a teacher, initially, I will demonstrate how to complete this chart with the whole class. While doing so, I will provide prompts and provocations to guide students to strategically look for text/illustration/self experiences and also the font and arrangement of texts that can communicate meaning and emotions to help them make and justify inferences. Students then will be sent off as pairs to complete another chart with a different plot event that might involve different characters. Each pair consists of students with different reading levels as to promote peer learning. With the assistance of the chart, students are able to construct a sequence of plot events and also to draw attention to the connections between the characters’ internal states and their actions, thereby enhancing reading comprehension. (McTigue et al., 2015).