Inference – Practical teaching strategies and ideas for TA support
Children are making inferences all the time, so why is it such a struggle when analysing texts, asks Rachel Clarke…
- by Rachel Clarke
- Experienced educator, consultant and writer specialising in primary English Visit website
Children are experts at making everyday inferences. 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.
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?
Local inferences
In the first instance, let’s take a look at ‘local inferences’. 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: 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. If you’re not too sure about the pronouns she and her, you may struggle to connect them correctly to Sarah and her mum.
Steps to take
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.
It’s interesting to note that pronouns are often the sticking point. Asking children to change the nouns in a short story, like the one below, into pronouns can help.
The children went to the park. The children played on the swings. Then the children played on the slide. After that the children had an ice-cream. Eventually the children went home and the children told the children’s mum about their day.
This type of activity can equally be used to encourage the use of pronouns for written cohesion. It’s likely that the children who are struggling to make small, local inferences are also struggling to write cohesive texts.
Global inferences
The big connections that take place across a text are sometimes called global inferences. These are the types of inferences where we may elaborate on top of what we have been told. This means making visualisations, exploring themes and forming evaluations.
Film can be a useful tool for helping children to make the visualisations that will help them connect with a text.
For example, if you are sharing a story about a jungle, it’s unlikely that all the class will have first-hand experience of that environment.
So, sharing film clips of jungles will help pupils build suitable images. With these in place, they will find it easier to answer the inference question you may want to ask.
Drawing characters and settings based on the descriptions provided by an author is another useful way to help children create visual images that will support them to build connections across a text.
Annotating their drawings with information from the text will be particularly helpful if they are required to reference the text when discussing their inferences.
As a twist on asking children to draw what they read, I recently used ChatGPT to create an image based on a text. The story I used was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. It’s a classic text full of antiquated and complex vocabulary that I didn’t expect my students to know.
By sharing the image after reading the text, we were able to see the challenging words – crenelations, herringbone brickwork, turrets – in context.
We could then open our discussions to make evaluations about how the author had led us to view the house as a safe, warm stronghold surrounded by a dangerous, desolate world. If you’ve not tried this, I urge you to do so.
Exploring themes
When we identify the theme of a text, we are making very deep inferences that sit below the story or narrative.
As adults this can be tricky; for children it can be very hard indeed. A technique that I’ve found helps with this, is to provide the children with a range of possible themes to explore that suit the story.
So, for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, you could give the class the option of friendship, good vs evil, love or self-discovery.
Encourage the children to discuss the themes and why they think they describe the message of the story. As an added extra, you could even print the themes onto cards and ask the children to place them on a target board to show their relevance by their proximity to the bullseye.
How can your TA help with teaching inference?
- If you have children who struggle with vocabulary, asking your TA to pre-teach key words before the reading lesson can be a valuable use of time.
- If you have children who struggle to make connections between related words, consider asking your TA to explore riddles with children. For example, I have hands but no face, what am I? (clock). This playful use of language should grow pupils’ vocabularies and help them appreciate how words are related.
- One of the barriers to making local inferences is recognising pronouns. Ask your TA to run a short intervention on pronouns for any children that need it, making sure they can match pronouns to nouns.
- For children who struggle to infer feelings, and words associated with emotion, build their bank of emotional language by asking your TA to undertake short role-play activities with them where they ‘show an emotion’. You could extend this to include synonyms for different feelings.
- Create a collection of intriguing images. Ask your TA to look at and discuss the images with children, starting with the phrase ‘What’s going on in this picture?’ They should prompt pupils to explain what leads them to make their inferences based on the images and what they may already know.
- Ask your TA to play the What am I? game with children, by placing sticky notes on their heads where pupils need to work out who or what they are by asking questions.
Rachel Clarke is the director of Primary English Education Consultancy Limited. She works with schools across the UK to raise standards in English. She is a keen blogger and runs primaryenglished.co.uk, a website bursting with advice and resources focused on teaching English.
