Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travelers out there on the road to evidence-based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast Reading Road Trip. Welcome to the second episode of Season 4.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the Earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country.
Along with this acknowledgement and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of an Indigenous artist and today we are sharing the picture book The Game by Henry Charles Ten Bears, illustrated by Shoshannah Greene. A beautifully illustrated reimagining of the origins of hockey from an Indigenous lens.
Killer Whale and Brown Bear are arguing. Brown Bear says he can beat Killer Whale at any challenge, yet Killer Whale disagrees. When Powerful Mena overhears their bickering, he comes up with a solution. A game on the ice played with sticks, nets, and a star for a puck. But who will win and earn the trophy? The book is for kids aged 4 to 8 and it features an introduction to Musqueam language and culture, beautiful watercolour artwork from a celebrated Haida artist, detailed back matter, and a pronunciation guide. With poetic text by gifted Indigenous storyteller Henry Charles Ten Bears, an elder of the Musqueam First Nation, and breathtaking illustrations by Haida artist Shoshannah Greene, The Game offers a vibrant introduction to Musqueam language and culture and inspires readers to rediscover a sport we know and love.
Add this title to your home or classroom library today and it is called The Game.
Now on with the show.
[00:02:04] Kate Winn: I am absolutely thrilled to introduce our guest this week here on Reading Road Trip, Dr. Jen O' Sullivan. She is a Lecturer in Literacy Education at Marino Institute of Education, an associated college of Trinity College, Dublin, where she teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education programs. Before moving into teacher education, she worked as a primary school teacher and continues to draw on this classroom experience to inform both her teaching and research. Jen is a past President of the Literacy Association of Ireland and a Research Fellow in the School of Education at Trinity College, Dublin. Her PhD research examined the role of phonemic awareness in supporting early literacy in a lower socioeconomic school context, and she remains committed to issues of equity in literacy education.
In 2022, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, spending time at the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University.
She is the author of A Sound Beginning for Reading, a Phonological Awareness Program, and co-author of the Phonics program Sounds Like Phonics, both of which are implemented in Irish primary schools. More recently, Jen was an invited member of a Dyslexia Ireland working group that developed guidance on Science of Reading-aligned interventions to support dyslexic students.
Alongside her academic work, Jen regularly delivers webinars and professional development for practicing teachers, helping to bridge the gap between research and classroom practice. Her research interests include early intervention for reading difficulties, early literacy development, teacher professional development, and the role of children's literature in early literacy instruction. Wow. So much going on there. So happy to have you with us. Welcome, Dr. Jen O' Sullivan.
[00:03:44] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Oh, thanks so much for having me on, Kate. I'm really looking forward to the conversation and particularly about talking about this really important component of reading that sometimes I think gets left behind in the early years in particular.
[00:03:58] Kate Winn: Absolutely.
[00:03:59] Kate Winn: So it's nice to see you. We're seeing each other face-to-face as we record this, but we actually met in person back in 2022. My extended family took a trip to Ireland, spent a lot of time in Dublin, and I actually got to have lunch with Jen. She was one of my literacy friends from Twitter, as it was called back then. And we had a lovely little lunch at the Commons Cafe at the Museum of Literature in Dublin. So that was so, so lovely. And now here we are again chatting. And you're here to talk about inferences.
And people don't often think of that. When you think about the early years, as you just mentioned, the first thing I want to ask you is, you know, we have these models of reading, like the simple view of reading Scarborough's Rope. A lot of focus has been on the word recognition side of things. I mean, here in Ontario, we had the Human Rights Commission did a Right to Read inquiry, lots of focus on the word reading piece for good reason because we were failing our kids in a lot of ways with that. However, maybe not quite as much emphasis or understanding of the role that language comprehension plays in being a successful reader. That is part of structured literacy. That is part of what we want to be talking about. Right. So can you just mention a little bit about that?
[00:05:06] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah, sure. And I think it's a really good place to start, the good old Simple View of Reading, looking at those two huge components that need to be in place for reading comprehension to happen.
And I think you're absolutely right, particularly at the junior end or I'll call it the junior end, but I suppose kindergarten and those early grades we do, and we have to spend so much time with the word recognition piece. But we also know that, you know, if either of those two big components is weak or is left out to some extent, that comprehension is going to suffer. So sometimes I think it's almost a shame that, you know, the Simple View of Reading, it's the same two big boxes and the same font. And I think sometimes in the early years, we could have a slightly bigger word recognition box and a slightly smaller comprehension. And then in those senior grades, the sort of reading comprehension grows and the word recognition might be a little bit smaller to show that, you know, we have to teach both, but there's very often a different focus depending on the grades that we're teaching. But I think the word recognition piece we're covering really well, particularly with the science of reading, it's had lots and lots of attention, and it's been highlighted so well.
The language comprehension piece, I think aspects of it, I think we are looking at things like vocabulary. We're looking at quite well.
I'll talk a lot about background knowledge this evening, because without background knowledge, we actually can't make inferences. So it's a really important component. But when it starts to move down to the sort of verbal reasoning piece, you know, it starts to get, I think, a little bit clouded. And I'm not sure there's a very strong understanding of what verbal reasoning sort of what should I be teaching when it comes to verbal reasoning?
The other challenge, I think, with the word sorry, the language comprehension piece, is that these are messier when it comes to teaching and assessment. You know, we don't have that lovely scope and sequence. Those will be finite skills. There's 26 letters. You know, suddenly we're in these unconstrained skills where we don't have a lovely scope and sequence for teaching vocabulary. These are skills that we're going to continue to learn throughout our whole lifetime. So it's much more complex to both teach and then to assess this side of the rope as well.
But looking at the verbal reasoning piece, which is, I suppose, where we're diving into a little bit more tonight. It's really what we're looking at is the ability to sort of understand and to think about and to reason with language. That's what we want the children to be able to do.
And I think sometimes if I can give you a little example of, you know, something that would require a good level of verbal reasoning. So imagine you've just said, you know, your class are lined up, they're ready to go home. And you say to them, oh, you've all been great. Well done everybody today. I hope your parents don't fade, faint when they see the state of your uniforms.
So there's a lot of verbal reasoning needed to understand that little sentence there. First of all, the teacher doesn't literally mean that their parents are going to faint. Okay? So we have to be able to look at a little bit of figurative language there. There's a little bit of exaggeration, little bit of humour, and then we have to bring our inferencing skills. Well, what state are the uniforms in?
Parents are going to faint. Well, they're probably not in a very good state. And, you know, we can maybe start making inferences as to why based on our background knowledge. You know, have they been doing painting? Has the teacher brought them outside? And they've got filthy dirty from being outside.
So even a little small sentence, even a verbal sentence like that can trip children up if they're very young and if they don't have quite a quite good verbal reasoning skills. So really, it's looking at inferencing and looking at that figurative language, metaphors, irony, hyperbole.
And the one I love, which hopefully we'll get to chat about a little bit later, is puns.
And I know, Kate, you as a kindergarten teacher must know that that age group tell the worst jokes imaginable. They make no sense. They think they're hilarious. And you're trying to sitting going, I really don't understand.
Because they don't have knowledge of puns and multiple word meanings.
So, you know, teaching jokes is wonderful to do, to try and help cultivate and develop that skill of understanding figures of language as well.
[00:10:02] Kate Winn: That's great. Thank you. So in this episode, we're going to narrow in on inferences.
What does it mean, first of all, to make sure we're all on the same page here, what does it mean to make inferences?
[00:10:16] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Sure, you'll often hear it called reading, the ability to read between the lines. So it's really that ability to.
Or a child's ability to take clues from the text that they're reading and to bring their own background knowledge of what they know about the world and to bring those two things together to identify something that isn't literally stated in the text. And authors use this all the time and they'll use this show don't tell kind of feature in their writing.
So very often it's up to us as readers to fill the gaps that, that the author has left. And that can be, you know, in wordless picture books, which again, hopefully we get to chat about right up to, you know, fiction that we just read as adults. Those gaps are in the texts. And we have to bring our own knowledge of the world and how the world works together with those clues to try to make inferences as to what's not being literally stated in the text.
And I think what it does as well, it tries to transform the reader from being a passive reader to very active. You're really bringing something of yourself to the text. And it also is that understanding that no two people will read a text in the same way, because we will all bring our own background knowledge and our personal experiences to a text by filling in these gaps that the authors have left.
[00:11:47] Kate Winn: And in our new ish Ontario language curriculum, they distinguish between global inferences and local inferences. Could you just touch on that distinction?
[00:11:56] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah, sure.
There are what we call sort of text connecting inferences, which would be what you'd be referring to there in terms of these sort of low local inferences. And this is understanding what the author has stated. So if I could give you an example, it would be something like Tom dropped his sandwich. He picked it up quickly. So these are very local inferences where we're using our linguistic knowledge to infer that the it is talking about the sandwich. So very it's within the text itself.
Then when we get into sort of more gap filling inferences, we're moving more into this idea of global inferences.
And this is where we're interpreting what the author has said by bringing our own knowledge, our own experiences to bear on what we're reading.
So an example here might be that, you know, the fire grew bigger. Sarah grabbed the extinguisher. So we have to make an inference that Sarah is grabbing the extinguisher because she wants to try to put out this fire.
So we've filled in that gap based on our own knowledge of what an extinguisher is, what it does, and what Sarah is trying to do in that particular instance. So it's really that idea of we're using the text in the local and making sort of linguistic, filling linguistic gaps, whereas with the global, we're bringing more of our own personal experience to the text in that instance.
[00:13:26] Kate Winn: Yes.
[00:13:26] Kate Winn: And I know I try to work on both with students, but the local ones, I find sometimes I'll be doing a read aloud and it'll say, you know, whatever, they gave it to her. And I'LL just stop and say, wait a second, they gave it to her. Who are they? Who's her? Right? And just see if they're getting that and have them practice. So that's great. Now, I know you have lots of really neat ideas to share with us in this episode about inferences in the early years, but I do want to touch on research because we are all about practices that are based in research, based in evidence. What can you tell us about the research on the importance of inferences when reading and even research on best ways to teach them? What do we know?
[00:14:04] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah, sure. There's quite a few studies, I suppose, looking more global. I think, when it comes to comprehension. The likes of the RAND study from 2002 is such a seminal document that we need to keep going back to when it comes to reading comprehension because there's just so much useful information in that particular document, the reading for understanding. But when we move into inferencing, there isn't as much research. There is some. So there's been research done by Oakhill and Cain back in 2012.
They were involved in quite a longitudinal research study that really did confirm that inference making predicted growth in reading comprehension over time.
There's been a couple more too that I'll talk about in a little bit more detail. One was by Tighe and Schatznider back in 2014. Now they did quite an interesting study. They wanted to determine predictor importance in 3rd, 7th, and 10th grade reading comprehension skills. And what they did is they ranked those skills by how well they were predicting reading comprehension.
And what they found is in third grade, fluency and verbal reasoning were important contributors contributors to reading comprehension. Then by seventh grade they were still looking at sort of fluency was a strong predictor and so was verbal reasoning. But by 10th grade it was really verbal reasoning that was a significant predictor of reading comprehension in those senior classes.
So what they sort of concluded was that I suppose older readers that had strong inferencing skills understood text better.
So that was one study.
Another slightly more recent one, 2019, is by Hall et al. So Colby hall and I think Sharon Vaughan was involved in that study as well.
This is a lovely one for teachers because there was instruction involved in this one. And they looked at the effects of inference instruction on the reading comprehension of English learners in with reading comprehension difficulties. So they looked particularly at sixth and seventh grade, and what they did is they implemented about 16 hours of instruction in inference.
They worked with Palacio's novel Wonder with the children, and they did lots of work on inference instruction. They incorporated lots of teacher modeling, think alouds, inference, eliciting questions during reading, and then they used lots of graphic organizers with the children.
And they did find that to improve reading comprehension skills.
Sorry, they were able to improve children's inferencing skills and comprehension skills as a result of this really direct, explicit instruction. So there is evidence, there's a lot more that could be done potentially, and none that I could find has been done at the very junior end of the school. They're generally kind of sixth grade.
And beyond really the studies that I've seen.
[00:17:16] Kate Winn: And am I right in assuming that this would be like many of the different reading comprehension strategies that are out there, that we need to explicitly teach students? We need to practice. But we're definitely not trying to just do a strategy of the week, where this is the week we teach inferences. And now we are done with inferences, and now we're on to the next thing. But maybe your teacher next year will do another week on inferences. You know, we, we want to teach them explicitly, but we also want to make sure that they're. They're used throughout their reading.
[00:17:44] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah, absolutely. I think the idea of, and in some cases in Ireland, we do a strategy a month, never mind a week. So you spend a month on this strategy and then it's left behind. And now I move on to the next one.
And some of this, I think, goes back to sort of the science of learning and what we know about how children learn and all that work on interleaving, you know, that you want to come back again. But I saw an interesting webinar with Hugh Catts there recently. Well, it was a couple of years ago, but he highlighted that strategies are effective. I mean, they're very much evidence based. We know they do help children become better comprehenders. But he said that the strategy that's most effective depends on what you're reading and why you're reading it.
So that's really important because the skill of inferencing might lend itself very well to novels. It might lend itself very well to picture books and poetry. Does it lend itself particularly well to informational texts?
I'm not sure. So depending on the text we're reading, depending on the purpose that we're reading, you know, some strategies will be more suitable than others. So we do definitely want to try and teach them in context. And definitely I would be using literature and books and texts as springboards. And look at, see, well, how can I bring inferencing or how can I teach inferencing as a result of using this particular picture book with the children or this particular particular novel. So they're very much evidence based. We do need them, but I do think we have to.
There's no doubt in the early years we have to teach them explicitly, you know, because we want children to know what they are and how to do them. And then what we want to do is use them more informally as we're teaching books, as we're teaching stories, as we're teaching informational text, whatever that strategy is.
[00:19:38] Kate Winn: And I want to just remind or maybe inform our Ontario listeners of the fact that making inferences is right there in the new curriculum document too. Grade one, expectation. Make simple inferences using stated and implied information and ideas to understand simple text.
All the way to grade eight, make local and global inferences using explicit and implicit evidence to explain and support their interpretations about various complex texts. So you can see the wording gets a little bit fancier. But we are working with this all the way through school. Next question for you, Jen, is I know in terms of this whole idea of making inferences that you're a strong advocate for knowledge building to support that. So tell us a bit about this.
[00:20:24] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah, just. That was really interesting what you said there, because in our curriculum here in Ireland, it's quite interesting and that's what got me quite interested in this area, because for stage one, which would be our equivalent of kindergarten, we have very similar draw on a repertoire of comprehension strategies and background knowledge to comprehend text independently, which I thought was interesting and collaboratively. So again, our curriculum is the same from kindergarten, from our junior infants, they're to be introduced to, you know, developing their background knowledge to comprehend text. So for us as well, it's right there, front and center that this is something that we should be teaching as early as possible.
But background knowledge, I don't know.
Have you read Susie Dent's I Don't Know if you know Susie Dent. Do you get Countdown in Canada?
[00:21:17] Kate Winn: No, I don't recognize that book.
[00:21:19] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Okay. Susie Dent is a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, and she also is on Dictionary Corner in this very famous quiz show over in the UK called Countdown, where they have to jumble up letters to make words and things like that. But she has a new book that I'm reading at the moment called Guilty by Definition. And I thought it was quite interesting just to highlight the importance of background knowledge. I just want to read you one little line from this because it struck me as I was reading it Tuesday's crossword in the Times seems to have caused a flurry from the usual suspects. The answer to two across was lasagna. I've put in a draft response. Oh, that old chamber pot. Simon said and looked pleased with himself.
So straight away I'm thinking to myself, why is Simon pleased with himself for mentioning chamber pot? And thankfully, Susie fills in my background knowledge for me. She says it was a joke that only an etymologist could, could possibly find funny, knowing that the word lasagna had begun with a Latin word for a potty.
So there you go, a bit of etymology.
But straight away, my background knowledge completely failed me. I had no knowledge of this connection between a chamber pot and a lasagne.
So background knowledge is critical. It's absolutely critical for making inferences. I. I can't fill in gaps if I don't have the knowledge or the prior experience to be able to fill in those gaps.
So I think as teachers we're really good at activating background knowledge. We spend quite a bit of time, maybe before we start a novel or we start a particular unit with children, right, we're going to activate the background knowledge.
What we need to maybe shift a little bit towards is building background knowledge because we know it is so crucial now for children's reading comprehension.
And we can see Hollis Scarborough identified that very early on in her reading rope. There's background knowledge up there on its own as one of those really important strands. So, you know, I suppose when we're looking at inferencing with young children, we have to realize that they don't have a huge amount of background knowledge, particularly in terms of how the world works.
So we do have to spend time building that background knowledge and not leave us until, you know, the senior classes or we'll wait for that to be built later on. And, you know, the way we're really going to do that is through read alouds with young children. And that's not to say, you know, it's up to us as teachers to fill in all this background knowledge. Children are going to learn this from their parents, from the TV shows they watch, from their friends, but a degree of it. We do have to take responsibility for so wide reading so important in the early years, making sure we're reading all those lovely informational texts to children just as much as we do the lovely picture books and things like that.
We also know background knowledge is really important from. I'm sure many people will have heard of the good old baseball study back in the 1980s, and it really stems from this idea of schema theory going back to all those Gestalt psychologists, but in actual fact, there's a really important seminal work by Anderson and David Pearson they wrote back in 1984. Now I'm going to have to read out the title of this and it'll probably turn people off straight away. It's a schema theoretic view of basis processes in reading comprehension.
But if we can ignore the title, basically what they were trying to say is that, you know, really doing comprehension is really fundamentally an interactive process between the reader's prior knowledge and the text.
And if I don't have the prior knowledge to access that text, well, that is very much going to affect my comprehension or my ability to comprehend the text.
And we know that this schema, these schemas, these sort of mental models we have about how the world works helps us in fair and it does help us fill in those gaps that are left so nice so nicely by authors as well.
And I'm sure many of your listeners will know the work of Natalie Wexler and her wonderful book the Knowledge Gap. Again, just highlighting how important knowledge building is, particularly in the early years. You know, we can start there, we can get. Then as they learn more, as they read more, they can use the knowledge that they already have and start attaching it into these mental models that they already, that they already have.
And Daniel Willingham, he has that lovely quote, you have to know something to learn something.
So that idea that new knowledge is built on the knowledge that we already have.
So background knowledge for anything in relation to reading comprehension is just absolutely critical. And it's critical that we start developing it as early as we possibly can with young children.
[00:26:50] Kate Winn: I know you've got so many great ideas for supporting young children to start learning about making inferences. And I'd like you to describe some of these. So I have the list in front of me. So I'm just going to prompt you and just get you to explain a little bit. So you say that we can do this using real objects. So tell us about that.
[00:27:06] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Okay, so there's lots of little. Obviously we want this to be as playful as possible and as hands on as possible for the children. So there's a couple of really nice little kind of games, play based games we can use with the children. So one is called what's in teacher's bag is one. Now as I say to the student teachers, please do not give them your actual handbag. You know, have a little backpack ready and just throw in a couple of little Objects. It could be a bus ticket, it could be a loyalty card, it could be anything at all. And the idea is that the children have to make inferences about the person who this bag belongs to.
What you can also do is say, you found this bag, I found this bag on my way to work. And look, do you think we can all be little detectives and try to figure out who might own this bag? So, you know, the children might pull out the bus ticket and make the inference that this person might get to work using the bus or they might pull out some glasses and realize that, oh, this person mightn't see very well. So they need their pair of glasses. So that's a lovely little hands on activity to start them off.
Another one to do would be having little mystery bags. So, so these would be little brown paper bags and you could sort of hide. It could be like a piece of fruit or anything at all. And then you would just have a couple of clues on the outside.
It's sweet.
It's, you know, you'd have a couple of little words where the children have to guess what's in the bag based on the little clues that you've given them. So it's, it's really what you're really trying to do is heighten their curiosity and this idea of looking for clues. Because when we're making inferences, evidence is really, really important.
So as we're teaching inferencing up at the senior end of the school, we want to make sure that the inferences they make are backed up by evidence from the text.
Because otherwise it's really just a guess or a prediction. I have to be able to back up my inference with evidence from the text. So this idea of looking for clues, we can start off at a really basic, really early age.
Another thing we can do is guess the character.
So we might have up on our whiteboard a couple of little objects or items that relate to a book character and the children have to guess. So for example, I might have an image of a coat, a suitcase, a train ticket. This will probably give it away, a jar of marmalade. And you know, get the children to guess who this character might be.
Hopefully they will guess Paddington Bear.
So these are all little ones that are really hands on, lots and lots of fun that focus on this idea of looking for clues within what will become a text for the children.
So that's one then what I like to do. Images are amazing for this and even for older children who might be struggling with the concept because it is quite quite a complex concept, the idea of making inferences.
I think visual images are amazing. Showing the children a visual image, it could be a photograph, and then asking them inferencing questions based on that particular image.
I love to use the work of Norman Rockwell. He has so many wonderful images that you can just draw such wonderful inferencing questions. But remember, we always want, well, what's your evidence?
What in the picture is showing you that the child is sad, or, you know, whatever that inference might be and what it does, it just takes away that I have to decode the text and I have to try and make inferences all at the same time. Well, let's just take away the cognitive load a little bit or lessen the cognitive load by just using an image and see can you find details that will give you clues. Now, young children, I'm sure you've seen this Kate yourself in kindergarten. Young children are brilliant at identifying the smallest little details and pictures that as adults, we nearly don't notice anymore, but they will zone right in. So images are absolutely fantastic for starting this work of looking for clues in texts. It just happens to be a visual text at the moment for them.
[00:31:31] Kate Winn: So that was the second way. Great. And then using wordless picture books is another idea that you have.
[00:31:38] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah, wordless picture books are just fabulous. They're such a resource to have at the junior end of the school, particularly if you have English language learners in your classroom. And in actual fact, it is impossible to read a wordless picture book without making inferences because the text isn't there to show you what to look at and how you move from one image to the next. You have to fill in the gaps between what's happened in one image and. And the images that follows it. So inferencing just has to happen when you're reading wordless picture books. So I remember doing a little study as part of my masters with a young group of grade five children. And I used the Snowman by Raymond Briggs, the wordless picture book. And they're just so good. They're making these inferences quite naturally.
So there's an image of the little boy, and he's asleep in bed, and there's 12 little images. And it's literally just the boy tossing and turning for the whole page, nothing else in the whole page. And she just came out with, oh, look, look, the little boy can't sleep because he can only think about the snowman. Now, there was nothing in that image. There was no little thought bubble to show that he was thinking of the snowman. She had made these inferences herself based on what she knew about the world and based on what was happening in the text.
So I should have said at the start as well that, you know, young children make inferences all the time. They're doing it in their real life. You know, somebody walks in, their dad walks in the front door, his hair is wet, his clothes are wet. You know, they make the inference that, you know, it's probably raining outside.
So we're just building on what they're already doing and we're trying to, I suppose, expand that into. This is something we do when we're reading as well as, you know, in our everyday life.
So, yeah, visual picture books are just wordless picture books are amazing. And that probably moves into the actual picture books with text and illustrations.
[00:33:42] Kate Winn: Yes.
[00:33:42] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: And these are highly sophisticated. There are certain picture books that where the images and the text actually contradict themselves. So one would be the likes of I Want My Hat Back by John Klassen is such a brilliant book because the images are almost doing the complete opposite to what the text is saying.
So this is almost harder because now I have to look at the interplay between what the text says and what the illustration is doing and then I have to bring inferences into this as well.
Hello, Lighthouse is another lovely text that the author leaves lovely gaps in the written text, but demonstrates them in the illustrations.
So it's, you know, making those inferences between what the text says and what the image shows as well is something that's really nice to be able to do during read alouds with really high quality, high quality picture books. And as well,
[00:34:45] Kate Winn: Are you familiar with the David Shannon picture books?
So they're very funny. So my class always loves one. It's called David Gets in Trouble.
But on each page there's just a line and it might be something like, it wasn't me or I forgot or but she likes it or something like that. Well, you would have absolutely no idea what that was referring to if you didn't look at the picture. And so I'll read the sentence to the kids and say, okay, well, what do you think? He didn't do it. He didn't do what? What do you think this is going to be? And then when I show the picture, it's like, oh, there's a cake with a great big fistful taken out of it and he's got brown all around his mouth. So what is it he's saying he didn't do? He's saying he didn't eat the cake. Right. So I like books like that too. It's just fun where they kind of have to figure it out, where the author doesn't actually come right out and just hit you over the head with what they're trying to say. Like, David took cake and he wasn't supposed to.
[00:35:41] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Well, that's the show don't tell piece and Rosie's Walk is another one. If you actually forget the illustrations and just read the text, the text is just over the haystack around the pond. In actual fact, the illustrations are carrying most of the message in that particular book. So, yeah, really sophisticated picture books are wonderful for children to have this interplay between and fill in the gaps of. Oh, and also looking at things like humour and, you know, the irony in text that, oh, well, the picture seems to be doing the complete opposite of what the actual written text is saying. So picture books are. Yeah, can't have enough.
[00:36:21] Kate Winn: And then using scenarios was your last idea. How can we do that?
[00:36:26] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Using scenarios, I suppose goes back to that little piece I was saying with, you know, the dad walks in and the hair is wet, or, you know, little things like Lily went out and saw the gate wide open, she started crying, she could see the leash on the ground and what do you think has happened here?
Now we can move these, depending on the level of, I suppose, the word recognition skill skills, we can move children into reading simple little scenarios and trying to, again, look for the clues, you know, what are the clues that are telling you that this might have happened. So even if we're doing this orally, it's not enough to just the children to say, oh, I think her dog ran away. But then we have to come straight back with, well, where in the text is it saying that? Or what makes you think that? So going back to making sure you're focusing in on what were the clues, what was the evidence in the text. So pushing them just that little bit more to get that little evidence piece out of them is going to be crucial later on when they are trying to do this independently with much more challenging text and things like that, and looking for that evidence, because that is really what it's all coming back to. But another little nice little strategy, sort of a little framework that I suppose kindergarten, or as I keep going to say, junior infant kindergarten teachers can use, is this idea of having a little framework like what I know, what I see, what I think.
So the what I know is we're activating that background knowledge. So, for example, if we looked at something like Rosie's walk. That idea that, well, what do we know about foxes and chickens? Do you know anything about foxes and chickens? And, you know, you might get a couple of children saying, oh, foxes like to catch chickens, or they like to chase chickens. They like to eat chickens. So activating all of that, you know, prior knowledge and background knowledge first, and then moving into, well, what do you see in the text? So this moves them into that little evidence piece. Or it could be what do I read instead of. But in the early years, what do you see?
Oh, I can see the little foxes hiding in the bush, and he's about to jump out at Rosie here, who's walking around.
And then the what I think piece is starting to put those two things together a little bit. My background knowledge and what I see in the text. Well, I think the fox in this story is trying to maybe chase Rosie, but things keep going wrong for him, obviously. So that little. And give them that little sentence prompt of I know.
So I know the foxes like to try catch hens. I see that the fox is creeping behind Rosie, So I think the fox is trying to catch her.
And then we can make a lovely segue into idioms. And if we're talking about foxes and idioms as sly as a fox, where does that come from? You know, so trying to really unpack a lot of this for young children, particularly idioms, because they just don't really.
[00:39:35] Kate Winn: Get them for sure. And especially if you're talking about students who are learning English as a secondary additional language. Right. Because first of all, they have to know the literal meaning of the words that you're saying. But, like, how does this connect in an idiom that might not be something that's in their home language to try to make sense of that is.
Is so important.
[00:39:55] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah. Often we gloss over it because, you know, we're so used to them ourselves. We don't think that children can't really interpret.
And then puns, as I said, get those jokes out and, you know, really get children thinking about, why is this funny? Because we have to improve their jokes.
[00:40:15] Kate Winn: Well, we have been talking a lot about the early years in this episode, and certainly with younger students. We need a lot of these ideas that you have shared. Shared that don't require them to decode the text first. We can start doing this building of an understanding, of making inferences without them. I mean, they can when they're using decodable books, and you can do what you can with that, but we'll probably have more luck at this level with the things you've been talking about. But could you see any of these ways of supporting inferences being used with older students too?
[00:40:45] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yeah, absolutely. Again, it is such a complex thing to try to explain. So even going back to the visual images, looking at those, giving children time to that idea of what it is you're trying to do is you're looking for clues, you're looking for evidence.
And for some children, even that is enough of a light bulb moment to go, oh, that's what you'd like me to do now when I'm reading text. So that can be really nice if you have a child who it's just not coming together for them, maybe take the text away and go back to using those visual images, modeling, I think all of those think alouds as teachers, modeling for children how you go about making inferences.
Some children just need to see that it doesn't matter how old they are, they just need to see that expert reader show how they go about that process. So I think that's really important. And the use of mentor text, because not all texts are going to be suitable and you know, we have to be really careful that we're using text that children can make inferences from, you know, that's going to be really important.
And I think a really nice way to support this in the senior end of the school is through children's writing.
So getting them to write as a reader and getting them to that she show don't tell piece, you know, can you put that into your own writing?
And that idea that you're building imperences for someone who's going to read. So instead of saying, you know, she was really angry, how are you going to show that instead of, you know, explicitly, very literally say their girl was angry. So I think writing can be really helpful to try and get them to actually write as.
Write as a reader in that sense themselves.
[00:42:43] Kate Winn: Yeah, Write something that's going to require your reader to infer.
[00:42:47] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yes, exactly.
[00:42:48] Kate Winn: Yeah, exactly. No, that's great.
[00:42:50] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Now they'll need a lot of support with that. But yeah. Do you know that that whole idea of showing and not telling and then explaining, well, authors do this all the time and they explain expect the same from us when we're reading. So yeah, so I think they're kind of useful and then, you know, building background knowledge. Again, if you're doing a particular text like a novel, like maybe Esperanza Rising, you know, really thinking about what background knowledge do the children need to really help them get deeper and understand this text at a deeper level. And to my huge embarrassment, when I was in kind of upper primary, we did Animal Farm.
And for the whole year I spent the time going, why are we doing a book about talking animals? Why on earth are we learning this? And I had no background knowledge to bring to that text.
And the only, well, I did have some. I knew about life on a farm and maybe I was pulling from texts like Charlotte's Web where there are talking animals. But what I was really lacking was, you know, knowledge about 20th century history and politics. And now we can have different levels. You know, we can have someone who knows, oh, you know, this is the pigs were dictators and. But then we can have somewhere in between as well. Well, I think these pigs seem really bossy. I mean, I was at entry level, I was at like, why are we doing a book about talking animals? So I needed a lot of background knowledge built before, you know, looking at that, that particular text. So bearing that in mind that we have a really good understanding of the background knowledge children are going to need in this particular to read this text.
[00:44:41] Kate Winn: Well, thank you.
[00:44:42] Kate Winn: Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you want to share with listeners or anywhere you want to direct them to your work or anything like that while we've got you?
[00:44:51] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: No. Look, it's just been so lovely to talk about something that doesn't get an awful lot of airtime very often at the junior end of the school.
If any of your listeners are interested, I have started recently a blog series on Substack which is very new to me but I'm really enjoying that kind of talking about all my reflections and musings.
Last month I spent the month of May talking about misconceptions in reading. So if anybody's interested in signing up, you'll find substack under my own name, Jen O'Sullivan. So I'm really enjoying that space because I think writing about reading, unless you're doing some kind of peer reviewed article or you know, which you're lucky to maybe get one or two a year if you're lucky, there really isn't an opportunity very often to write about literacy, for example. So I've really enjoyed the space. It's really nice. I'd love it to be as interactive as possible as well. People get involved in the comments and quite happy for people to disagree and.
[00:45:59] Kate Winn: Well, I love your substack. I think I subscribed as soon as I heard about it and your series in May was really great. I know I shared on social media just a couple little Screenshots of one of the myths or misconceptions that you were kind of busting. And it was the one about kind of the dyslexia being a superpower kind of idea and talking about that, which I thought was really, you know, important the way you, you kind of broke that down. And, and yet your posts are all so, so informative. They're really easy to read. They're very, you know, reader friendly. But also I know that the research and the science is there. So I can trust what, trust what you're saying, right? Because some people can write lovely reader friendly blog posts.
[00:46:37] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Yes.
[00:46:38] Kate Winn: But it's just their philosophy or their opinion or whatever. And that's fine when you know that that's what that is. But you've got that science backing which, which is great.
[00:46:47] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Well, well, my mom is one of my followers so I keep having her in my head every time I go to do a substack and go, okay, I have to write this so my mum will understand what I'm talking about. So hopefully they're very accessible. But again, I have to. They're a blog. There's only so much you can get into. But I do try to keep them as research informed as I possibly can. But thank you so much for sharing about it, Kate. Really appreciate it.
[00:47:12] Kate Winn: Well, thank you so much for being here with us for this episode of Reading Road Trip. Dr. Jen O' Sullivan, it has been a pleasure.
[00:47:21] Dr. Jen O'Sullivan: Thank you so much Kate. I've really enjoyed the conversation so thanks for having me on.
[00:47:29] Kate Winn: Show. Notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found@the podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season four episode two with Dr. Jen O' Sullivan.
Now it's time for that typical end of the podcast call to action. If you enjoyed this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and of course we welcome any social media love you feel inspired to spread as well.
Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me. My handle is thismomloves on Twitter and Facebook, katethismomloves on Instagram and Kate Winn on Bluesky. Make sure you're following Reading Road Trip in your podcast app so you don't miss a single episode in this jam packed season. New episodes will continue to be released on Monday mornings all summer long. We couldn't bring Reading Road Trip to you without behind the scenes support from the wonderful Brittany Haynes and Melinda Jones at IDA Ontario.
I'm Kate Winn and along with my co producer, Una Malcolm. We hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun.
