Enseñanza de estrategias para la inferencia del significado de las palabras

Résumé

A programme for teaching inference strategies to help understand unknown words through the use of contextual cues is reported. Sixty-four 10-11 years old children distributed into experimental and control groups participated in the study. The experimental group received 18 sessions of instruction involving activities related to the following strategies: clarifying task goals, breakdown of the task into different parts, self-assessment, and justifying answers. The following dependent measures were used: explicit word meaning, implicit meaning, awareness of inference strategies, recall, understanding explicit main ideas, and cloze. Subjects in the experimental group improved with respect to controls in the following measures: explicit and implicit meaning, awareness of strategies (partly), and recall. No generalization effects were found in relation to cloze or to understanding ideas.