Bringing Decodable Texts to Life With Comprehension Strategies - Jill Lauren...

This session was led by Jill Lauren who wrote the text Jen's Web that we used as an exemplar. I chose this session as my main objective at ISTE is to do something for the Juniors, something for the seniors and something for me. This one was for our junior team.

When looking beyond barking at print effective reading instruction must be grounded in cognitive science rather than guessing. Comprehension is calculated as Word Recognition (WR) × Language Comprehension (LC) = Reading Comprehension (RC). Reading is never just loudly pronouncing words (barking at print) without processing meaning. Reading is highly complex, requiring the simultaneous interaction of the 5 pillars of literacy, working memory, and executive function.

• Readers must build three cognitive levels at the exact same time:

  • Decoding the literal words.

  • Integrating the text with prior knowledge.

  • Generating inferences to create a complete mental model.

Early Comprehension is vital and comprehension instruction should start early alongside phonics, rather than waiting until decoding is mastered. Learning to read and reading to learn happen simultaneously.

Inference: 

• Texts are rarely fully explicit. Authors leave gaps, making inference the ultimate predictor of long-term comprehension success.

• Local Inference: Word-level connections, such as understanding synonyms and tracking shifting pronoun references (a common stumbling block for poor comprehenders).

• Global Inference: Broader text-level themes, author's purpose, predictions, and cause-and-effect patterns.

• Proven Efficacy (Dr Amy Elleman, 2017): A meta-analysis shows explicit inference interventions over 2–10 months yield a strong effect size of 0.58. It significantly increases both literal and inferential outcomes for struggling readers.

• Teachers must actively teach students how to activate their background knowledge and explicitly model how to answer inferential questions.

Follow up tasks to support comprehension:

1. Discover the Cover

• Action: Before opening a text, have students look at the title and illustration to predict the story using a prediction box worksheet or the whiteboard.

• The Twist: Ask students to share a time they felt, thought, or acted like the character on the cover. This bridges prior knowledge directly into the context of the book to keep them engaged.

• Text Selection: Use high-quality, vocabulary-rich decodable books with full narrative arcs early on (e.g., Phonics Books like Jen’s Web or Whole Phonics resources) rather than relying solely on low-word repetitive readers.

2. Prediction Playground

• Action: Write 4 possible predictions on the board at a critical point in the text.

• The Twist: After reading a snippet, students choose a prediction, physically move to a corner of the room to discuss it with peers, and then defend their choice to the whole class using text evidence.

• Benefit: Cultivates essential self-questioning and self-explanation habits early.

3. Sentence Practice (True/False Detective)

• Action: Write two true sentences and two false sentences about the text on the board.

• The Twist: Students must identify the false sentences and explicitly prove why they are incorrect by pointing directly to evidence in the text.

• Benefit: Simultaneously builds sentence comprehension, self-monitoring, oral language, active listening, and text-based justification.

The ultimate goal is intrinsic motivation. Starting early with systematic decodable books allows students to experience immediate success, which in turn drives motivation. Intrinsic motivation leads to children reading more, which directly builds a larger vocabulary and broader world knowledge, allowing for deep comprehension.

Learn Create Share in LS2

This week we have been creating our own maths games to help us consolidate the language and learning from this term. I decided to use this challenge to reinforce my student's connections to our Manaiakalani pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share. All the games were created using Google Slides. The games focus on times tables, decimals, addition, subtraction, word problems and doubles, and have been designed to encourage players to use the clues given along with their prior knowledge to find the answers. At the end of this challenge each student presented their game to the class and our special guest, Karen Ferguson. Here is the link to her blog post

Have a look at Jack's, Nevaeh's and Anglea's blog posts for great reflections of this learning.

These games are all on our class site and we would love to share them. 

Inference: When do we use it in our learning?...

Having unpacked and explored the comprehension strategy of inference during reading lessons I wanted my target students to be able to tap into this learning and use their inferencing skills during our maths lesson. As a scaffold for these students I asked my whole class to remind me of when we use inferencing skills in our learning. What completely shocked me was that not one person could answer this question. Incase there was a confusion between inferencing and inference I asked my students what inference was. Again no one could give me an answer! I used a variety of DATS (direct acts of teaching) to prompt a response but still no one gave me a correct response. Thinking on my feet, I recited the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill then asked my learners two questions. 

1. Was Jack a boy or a girl? 
2. How old was Jack? 

When the answers were given I asked, 'How do you know?' I was told that Jack is a boy's name so we can assume he's a boy, and he's young because in all the books they have a little kid drawn. I then cast a written version to the TV and asked everyone to talk to their buddy and show them where this information was in the text. One student said 'We can't Miss because it's not there.' I then explained it isn't written in the text because there are enough clues in the words (and images) for us to logically guess this information. 

I think my learners were thrown by my question because we always talk about inference and respond to inferential questions during our guided reading sessions, but on this occasion I asked them a reading based question during our maths learning time. Unfortunately none of my learners were able to knowingly transfer learning from one context to another. 

We then looked at the maths question: 

197 adults and 152 children were on the afternoon flight from Christchurch to Auckland. If 176 of the people that boarded the plane are male, how many are female? 

In pairs I asked my learners to read the question aloud then reread it and find the maths. Once they had the numbers to work with I asked them to decided were they being asked to find a sum or an addend. When that had been established I asked them to use what they already knew to decide which number operation would be the best choice to help them find the answer. Alongside each step we revisited the fact that we were inferring (ie: using the clues given with our prior knowledge to help us find the answer). 

What began as a scaffolding strategy evolved into a deep dive into a learning experience full of rich discussion for all my learners that I hope to build on to strengthen the connections between inference in reading and inference in maths.

Strengthening my connections to Inference...

Maths questions include numerical information that when combined with a mathematical symbol (or the text version of this), prompts students to use what they already know to help them make inferences about what they need to do with the information to find the answer. Having had a rich discussion about this with my friend and colleague Sheree Hodge (Ranui Schoo In-school Maths CoL teacher), I decided to dig a little deeper to strengthen my own understanding.

Inference helps students comprehend text. It is the skill of using what you already know to work out what you don't know based on the clues given to help you visualise what is happening. Simply put, inferencing involves using what you know to make a guess about what you don't know. There are two types of inference, default inference (automatic assumptions) and reasoned inference (a conclusion made based on the information available). 'Once students have identified the premises on which they've based their inferences, they can engage in the most powerful part of the process—examining the validity of their thinking.' Marzano (2010).

'Inferences are made when information the author assumes can be logically made are left out,' Carr (1983). We make inferences every day, and often because this is automatic don't realise what we have inferred wasn't included in the information we were given. If we are driving and suddenly the flow of the traffic slows down we infer that there is a problem ahead by exploring possibilities (maybe the traffic lights are short phasing, or someone has broken down or maybe there has been an accident) to make sense of the situation. No one gave us these details but as the traffic flow has slowed we know there is a problem and automatically draw on what we know to be possible reasons to help us explain the situation. In reading we 'read between the lines' to use the information given about a character or situation to visualise what is happening then use what we know to be possible behaviours or outcomes to help us draw conclusions about what might happen next or explain why something happened the way it did. In maths this is no different because written maths is inference. Students have to infer from the language in the written problem what numbers are involved, the number knowledge they require and whether or not they're trying to find a sum or a missing addend. 

From a word problem our learners need to be able to work out what the mathematical problem is first and in order to do this they need to understand the literacy of maths. If you think about this in relation to English, think about how as a teacher you use word studies to grow vocabulary knowledge. We help our learners explore the different synonyms for a word by unpacking the definition and talking about the different ways that word can be used in a sentence. We then scribe the student generated examples to allow our learners to make a visual connection to what this looks like in context. There is no difference in maths. If addition is used as the example, we need to talk about what addition looks like eg: A + B = C or B + A = C and explore the synonyms of 'add' to grow vocabulary knowledge in context. Once we have this knowledge we then need to use it help us make the inferences needed to find the sum (eg: A + B = ____), or the missing addend (eg: A + ___ = C). What I mean by that is once the students have identified the key mathematical words and the numbers they need to work with, they must then use this knowledge to infer what it is they are being asked to do with the information they have.

My next step is to find out if my learners know and understand what inferring means in a reading context, then see if they are able to transfer this knowledge to a maths context.

Readings to support my learning:

• Marzano, R. (2010). Teaching inference. Educational Leadership, 67(7), 80-01
• Carr, K (1983). The Importance of Inference Skills in the Primary Grades, p 518-522
• Making Inferences to Improve Reading Comprehension
• Reading Rockets
• Why you need to teach inference to struggling readers