Reading in English: Inference skills of young language learners
Reading in English: Inference skills of young language learners

Summary/Abstract: Reading comprehension is a very complex process that depends on a number of cognitive andmetacognitive skills and processes, the crucial ones being inference skills. The paper presentsthe results of a study that aimed to identify the inference skills of young learners of English as a foreignlanguage in comprehending a narrative text (a comic strip). The participants were 90 young learners aged11, drawn from a state primary school in Serbia. The post-reading reflection protocol was used to collectqualitative data on the participants’ inference skills, while quantitative data were collected by means of areading task. The results indicate that successful readers applied a variety of inference skills, flexibly combininglocal inferences (referential, case and antecedent causal inferences) with global inferences (superordinategoal, thematic, and character emotional reaction inferences), and monitoring their comprehension whilereading. 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 developmentof young English language learners’ inference skills into reading programmes.

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