Reading in English: Inference skills of young language learners

Abstract

Reading comprehension is a very complex process that depends on a number of cognitive and metacognitive skills and processes, the crucial ones being inference skills. The paper presents the results of a study that aimed to identify the inference skills of young learners of English as a foreign language in comprehending a narrative text (a comic strip). The participants were 90 young learners aged 11, drawn from a state primary school in Serbia. The post-reading reflection protocol was used to collect qualitative data on the participants' inference skills, while quantitative data were collected by means of a reading task. The results indicate that successful readers applied a variety of inference skills, flexibly combining local inferences (referential, case and antecedent causal inferences) with global inferences (superordinate goal, thematic, and character emotional reaction inferences), and monitoring their comprehension while reading. By contrast, less successful readers relied mainly on local inferences, not monitoring their understanding, which resulted in poor scores in the reading test. The study highlights the need for integrating the development of young English language learners' inference skills into reading programmes. young English language learners, reading comprehension, post-reading reflection protocol, local and global inferences, world knowledge. introduction Reading Comprehension and Inference Skills Reading comprehension is a very complex process that depends on a number of cognitive and metacognitive skills and processes, the crucial ones being inference skills. Reading knowledge and skills of successful readers operate very quickly in working memory at lower and higher level processing, resulting in text comprehension through the formation of a text model of reading comprehension (Grabe & Stoller, 2011; Nation, 2005). The reader's background knowledge (schema) and inference skills help the formation of a situation model of reader interpretation, without which comprehension is rather shallow (Kintsch & Rawson, 2005). The construction of a textbase and situation model in reading comprehension is very much dependent on inferencing, i.e. "the ability to use two or more

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“…Inference making is such a skill as is very essential in reading comprehension because inference skills and background knowledge of readers establish situation model which helps reading comprehension. Therefore, inferencing constitutes a solid foundation for text base and situation model which are of crucial significance in reading comprehension (Savic, 2018). Currie and Cain (2015) also highlight the importance of inferencing in reading because inferencing skills help readers integrate information within text by unearthing implicit information.…”

“…Broek et al (2015) also claim that the role of inference skills in creating coherence by connecting parts of a text has been recognized by cognitive models of reading and comprehension. Savic (2018) has conducted a study to identify EFL young learners' inference skills. This study has used mixed-method approach to collect quantitative and qualitative data.…”