Transactional Reading: Making Inferences

For students who struggle to read, textual inferences may present a real challenge. I’d like to begin teaching students to draw inferences visually, starting with a game of charades. Students will watch their classmates act out a word or concept and try to decipher the answer. After the correct word or concept is guessed, I will ask students to list many reasons why they came to that conclusion. I explain that their ability to connect what they saw their classmate act out with their thoughts in order to “create an educated guess” is an inference, made visually.

The second "hook" activity I would use to draw students into a lesson on inferences is asking students to cut one piece or image out of a magazine photograph or advertisement. Students will have to guess what piece of the picture is missing. After inferring the correct answer, students will discuss the different clues that helped them to discern the missing image.

After engaging them visually, I would transition into making textual inferences. One genre of texts that requires making inferences is song lyrics, a genre my students are especially enamored by. Whenever students in my school get the chance, they “secretly” and excitedly draw an earbud out of their collared uniform shirt. You can see their bodies relax and their thoughts travel to a distant place. While music often functions as a way for students to “check out,” I’d like to use their favorite songs as an entry point into making inferences. I will ask each student to bring in the lyrics for one song. We will practice making inferences with the lyrics together by discussing things we already know about the text. Then, we’ll circle pronouns, places, and events to imagine who, where, and what the song might be about. After working together as a class, students would transition into small-group work, using copies of other song lyrics to make connections between the text, the world, and themselves.

Finally, when students begin to feel comfortable with the concept and practice of making inferences, I would play this well-known, hilarious clip of two characters who simply cannot infer what the other is saying: Abbott and Costello.