You’ll be teaching inferencing across all grade levels. It’s a type of verbal reasoning that children will be using to make sense of what they read throughout their lives.
Children begin to make inferences from nonverbal cues, tones, and other social interactions early in their language development.
Think of how babies make inferences long before they are speaking whole sentences. For example, a baby may show excitement when a mother unfolds the stroller and asks, “Where shall we go today?” The baby is drawing on their background knowledge (their experience) to infer that they are about to go on a walk outside! This is an example of early reasoning made visible.
A child will transfer their inferencing skill to reading as they learn to apply information from those three sources mentioned in our overview:
- The text
- Visuals
- Background knowledge
We know from decades of research that, in the words of Fisher and Frey (2014), “listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension from early childhood through at least middle school.” Read-alouds are an effective method used to develop listening comprehension and support children as they transition to reading comprehension. As students become more confident in their decoding skills, they are able to practice the higher-order reasoning skills, such as inferencing. When decoding is secure, their cognitive energy is freer for inferencing, as they read independently.
With regards to inferencing and other thinking processes involved with comprehension, it can be helpful to note the distinction between those processes and the comprehension products we ask students to produce. The thinking processes, which we need to explicitly teach, lead to the students’ ability to predict, retell, conceptualize a main idea, summarize, and draw conclusions.
Inferencing is one of the teachable reasoning skills that will help our students comprehend — and show that comprehension.
