Let us work on six key strategies for teaching inference generation. Applying these techniques will produce a significant change in their understanding of learning.
1. Create Information or Knowledge Building
Build your students with endless or inferential thinking by developing their prior knowledge. All necessary knowledge is required for them to understand: The knowledge of ideas and opinions, understanding what motivates people, consideration of the feelings and characteristics of the characters, appreciating the dominant themes of our culture.
2. Study Genre
Teach your students about genre with in-depth research which will help them to understand much better. From the study of the myth the students learns that the characters have problems and purposes. Characters respond to problems, have feelings, and reflect traits. Comprehension of genre, especially the structure of a text of a genre, helps students to make clues and produce new insights.
3. Express the Thoughts
When reading aloud or in a conversation, compare the process of unlimited thinking, a simple chart can make this thinking clearer. Ask each question and write down what you think. Next, give students a chance to try out the same process.
Questions we may ask: What did the author fail to write? What clues did the author leave out? What do I know? What can I do?
4. Teach Clear Inferences
Highlight certain clues and make each focus a teaching. First of all, you can learn about the feelings and characteristics of the characters and the many words we use to name them. It’s hard to put into words the kind of person you would be if you were easy to talk to. Next, infer a title. Once you have explored the inferences that can be made with fiction, move on to studying the inferences necessary with informational text such as cause and effect and determining main idea.
5. Set Important Learning Objectives
Students can study for shallow or in-depth purposes. Finding out what happens next is a shallow purpose and is usually what students think when we ask them to predict. Asking how a character can change or how he or she will solve his or her problem will force the reader to think more deeply about the text. Setting a deep purpose changes the reader’s standard of coherence or what he will accept as adequate comprehension. If a student’s levels rise, like deciding what will happen next, then nothing can force him to think deeply. The purpose for which we read effects the standards of coherence and that in turn drives the type and depth of our inferences.
6. Plan Series of Inferential Questions
When we are interacting with students in text discussions, we have to ensure that the maximum questions are inferential. This sets an expectation for how students read. If they expect a series of inferential questions they will ensure to study in depth and engage themselves with inferential thinking.
We hope that these six strategies will help you develop a better inference reading ability.