Inferring is the ability to understand what is not directly stated. It’s an important skill that can help out in many areas of life, and it’s something that children can struggle with. If your child has difficulty with inferring, a speech therapist can help.
The very first step is diagnosing students’ strengths and weaknesses with inferencing. An SLP may have children read social situations or ask them questions about a situation they might be familiar with, then assess their responses to see where they are having trouble.
The next stage is providing opportunities to practice inferencing skills. This may look like having the child read a story aloud and then answer comprehension questions, or even having them create their own stories around pictures. The SLP will help guide students through developing their inferencing skills until they feel confident enough to use them independently.
Inferencing is when a person uses information from text to make an educated guess about what is happening. When a person infers, they are drawing conclusions and making connections between the information in the text and what they already know. Making inferences is an essential part of understanding text.
Making inferences is an essential skill for understanding text. Not everything that readers (or listeners) need to understand about the story can be found in the text. Readers often have to use clues from the story and combine them with what they already know to make an inference, or best guess, about what has happened or will happen in the story. This skill of inferring can be learned and developed.
Inferencing is the ability to use clues from a text to figure out what’s happening. You are using your prior knowledge, or schema, and combining it with the story details in order to make inferences. When you read a book, you may be presented with a story that you’ve never heard before. To fully understand and enjoy the story, it is important to use your schema and make inferences about what is happening in the text.
Inferencing is a critical skill in school and in life. It requires using background knowledge, prior experience, context clues, and clues given by the speaker or writer to figure out what’s happening when it’s not explicitly stated. This is a skill kids develop as they get older, but younger kids can also be taught to use it to help them understand what they’re reading.
For example, if a kid reads the sentence “Jimmy left his house,” she has to use her background knowledge of the world and make an inference about why Jimmy left his house. She might infer that Jimmy went on vacation, or he went to school, or he moved somewhere new.
In therapy, inferencing can be practiced in many ways. One way is through reading comprehension exercises—these are usually short articles with some information missing; kids are asked to fill in the blanks with answers that make sense based on what they’ve read. These exercises can be done alone as a teacher or parent guides a child through the process of answering questions about a story; they can be done in groups where each person takes turns reading different stories and asking their peers questions; they can even be done as an entire class where everyone reads one story and asks questions of their classmates.