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Recent official policy and concepts of reading comprehension and inference: the case of England's primary curriculum
Author(s) -
Williams Jazz C.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
literacy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.649
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1741-4369
pISSN - 1741-4350
DOI - 10.1111/lit.12012
Subject(s) - inference , construct (python library) , reading comprehension , comprehension , reading (process) , representation (politics) , curriculum , national curriculum , epistemology , computer science , sociology , psychology , mathematics education , pedagogy , political science , artificial intelligence , politics , law , programming language , philosophy
This article engages with recent policy on reading comprehension. It argues that the construct of inference has been treated as a single entity despite research and literature to the contrary, and this is perpetuated in the National Curriculum for 2014. It explores the limitations of conceptualising inference as a unitary construct and demonstrates that official policy has confused progression in inference with the process of a reader building a mental representation of a text. It argues that criterion‐referenced statements for progression in inference are flawed. The article proposes a means of conceptualising inference so it can be operationalised for the purpose of teaching and learning in the classroom. This is exemplified and applied to an example of a standardised test.