The Effect of Inference Training on Skilled and Less Skilled Comprehenders

Abstract

This paper assess the impact of introducing inference training to skilled and less skilled comprehenders. Children aged between 6 years 6 months and 9 years 11 months, classified as skilled or less skilled comprehenders, were instructed on how to make inferences from and generate questions about a text over a period of six sessions. Comparison groups of skilled and less skilled comprehenders were trained in standard comprehension strategies. The less skilled group showed a significantly greater improvement than the skilled group, regardless of the training given, but inference training was significantly more effective than standard comprehension strategies in the less skilled group. Seven out of ten less skilled readers who were inference trained increased their performance sufficiently to become classified as skilled comprehenders, whilst four out of ten less skilled comprehenders taught standard comprehension strategies improved to the same level. It is concluded that the value of explicitly teaching children inferential skills is that the enjoyment of the task of reading is enhanced and is therefore more likely to be undertaken readily, even by pupils who may have initially found reading difficult.

A Structural Equation Model to Explain the Effect of Fluent Reading, Literal Comprehension and Inferential Comprehension Levels of Elementary School 4th Grade Students on Success in Problem Solving

“…Öte yandan Perkins, Allen ve Hafner (1983) anlama için metin içinde açıkça verilen bilgilerin algılanmasının yeterli olmadığını, yazarın metinden hareketle vermeye çalıştığı örtük mesajın algılanmasının gerektiğini vurgulamıştır. Yazarın verdiği mesajın ortaya çıkarılabilmesi için ise çıkarımsal anlamanın gerçekleşmesinin gerektiği düşünülmektedir (Perkins ve diğerleri, 1983;Mcgee ve Johnson, 2003).…”

Students’ First Language Skills After Six Years in Bilingual Education

“…The older the students get the more they need good reading skills to acquire new information and the more complex texts they have to be able to comprehend. (Bowyer-Grane & Snowling, 2005; National Core Curriculum for Basic Education, 2004;McGee & Johnson, 2003. ) In CLIL, the content of all teaching has to be concise in order to leave sufficiently time for teaching through a foreign language.…”

A randomized control trial of Shared Evaluation Pedagogy: The near-term and long-term impact of dialogically organized reading instruction

“…Other studies (e.g., Jordan et al, 2000) have included a focus on vocabulary instruction as a lever for improving students' assessed comprehension. Of those studies that target global comprehension directly, the emphasis is generally on explicit teaching of comprehension strategies such as summarization, question generation and/or specific kinds of comprehension-related tasks, such as locating the main idea of a passage or making inferences about textual meaning (Brown et al, 2005;Leslie & Allen, 1999;O'Connor et al, 2002;Johnson-Glenberg, 2000;Lubliner, 2004;Mason, 2004;Meyer et al, 2002;McGee & Johnson, 2003). We were not able to locate intervention studies that provided opportunities for students to explore textual meaning through authentic, contingent, open dialogue.…”

“…A number of approaches, particularly those that emphasize the explicit teaching of strategies to support student comprehension of text, share some features with dialogically organized instruction, but do not depend on the satisfaction of the above criteria. For example, reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1986;Takala, 2006) and inference training (McGee & Johnson, 2003), which do at times involve students talking directly with each other, may emphasize student-generated test questions (not fully satisfying the authenticity criterion), place no special emphasis on teacher uptake of student ideas (not fully satisfying the contingency criterion), and/or work from structured, pre-scripted protocols that deliberately shape what will be talked about when (not fully satisfying the organic student-driven dialogue criterion). As Wilkinson and Son (2011) have argued in their review of the historical turn in recent years toward dialogism in contemporary reading instruction, authentic dialogue no doubt is possible within some forms of strategy-based instruction (and, indeed, could potentially account for assessed comprehension gains more than student application of the strategy taught); still, they categorize such programs as conceptual precursors of dialogic teaching, not as part of the current wave of dialogic teaching, explaining what is distinctive in the current wave of dialogic teaching in these terms:…”