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.