ELT Concourse Teacher Training: Inferencing in Language Learning

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Glossaries Articles

Inferencing

This is quite a long guide with several sections so you may like to search it (use Ctrl + F to do that). The guide defines two directions of inferencing and then considers top-down and bottom-up strategies with some classroom implications of both. On the way, it covers extra-, inter- and intra- linguistic clues to meaning. You can click on these links if you are only interested in top down or bottom-up processing.

What does this mean?

If you glance at this image, it seems reasonable to assume that will understand that it tells you the direction to an emergency exit. However, nothing in the image explicitly states anything about an emergency, an exit or what you are supposed to do with this information. You inferred all the data you need from simply glancing at the image. How did you do that? Think for a moment and then click here.This is not particularly mysterious, although it is quite clever. People do it all the time. In fact, it would be virtually impossible to live in any sort of society without drawing reasonable conclusions based on your experience and knowledge of other people from what you see, hear and read.

id C er. of all

SCIQUE ( LAGH wetter 1 /4 8% northwestern L'SA idea noun 1 a plan de by thinking. 2 x

What is Inferencing?

Inferencing is often described as a form of guessing. It is not. Guessing usually implies a stab-in- the-dark approach to knowing something. Inferencing, on the other hand, may be defined as deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true In other words, it is a method of calculating what is likely to be true based on prior expectations and knowledge. In the field of statistics, one approach is to do what is called Bayesian processing to arrive at reasonable inferences based on expectations and previous knowledge of the world. In the process of learning or using a language, inferencing is a key skill but it is not one, as we saw above, that learners need to be taught how to do so much as one they need deliberately to employ.

Here's an example of Inferencing

If you are presented with a die and asked to infer what your chances of throwing a six (or any other number between 1 and 6) were, you would probably say, quite rightly, 1 in 6, i.e., a roughly 16.67% chance that any throw of the die will result in a six (or any other possibility). You would, therefore, guess that your chances of throwing a particular number are 1 in 6. Now, however, you are told that out of the last 100 throws of this particular die, 50 have resulted in a six. What is your 'guess' now of the chances of a six coming up? Right: inferencing is more than guessing. Now take the situation in which you are faced with an unknown word in a sentence. The word is, for argument's sake, chenlob and you have no idea what it means at all. Can you infer its meaning? No, you can't but you can make some guesses based on what you know about the language. You have, roughly a 20% chance that the word is a noun and much less than a 1% chance that it's a hitherto unknown preposition. It could easily be a verb (a chance of something like 15%) but it is less likely that it is an adjective or an adverb (around 7% each). It is almost impossible that the word is a new (to you) determiner or a pronoun. Now you may be presented with a little co-text and see: the chenlob because you can infer from your knowledge of syntax that the word is a noun, preceded by a determiner, you may adjust your inference to decide that it is a noun of some kind. Unfortunately, you now see more co-text and that is: the chenlob wall so now you may discard your original inference and decide, on the basis of this new evidence, thatyou are presented with an adjective which is modifying the word wall. Your knowledge of syntax allows this to be the most likely possibility because the sequence determiner + adjective + noun is a commonplace of English. Moreover, you also know what a wall is and that can lead you understanding that the adjective does not mean something like speculative, electronic, papery, or happy because these are not epithets which can be applied sensibly to walls. It could, naturally, describe a range of other possible ways a wall can be including high, brick, beautiful, surrounding, impenetrable and so on. If, however, you were presented with The chenlob spoke at the meeting you would be able to reinforce your suspicion that the word is a noun and, moreover, that it represents some kind of person because your knowledge of the world includes the fact that only humans speak at meetings. If you are now given written context (with punctuation as well as co-text) such as: The Chenlob spoke at the meeting and all her fellow Chenlobs applauded her even though the chairman had determined that Chenlobs do not have voting rights because they come from outside the county. you may be able to make a pretty good guess that a Chenlob is a member of a definable set of people identified with a place. What you have done here is apply probabilistic reasoning based on both your knowledge of the syntax of the language and your understanding of the world of meaning. In other words, you have applied extra linguistic knowledge as well as intra-linguistic knowledge to reach your inference. Dennett, 2017:269, puts it this way: ... the brain's strategy is continuously to create "forward models," or probabilistic anticipations, and use the incoming signals to prune them for accuracy - if needed. When the organism is on a roll, in deeply familiar territory, the inbound corrections diminish to a trickle and the brain's guesses, unchallenged, give it a head start on what to do next. What we do next, of course, is understand and, if necessary, act on the linguistic data we are receiving.

Why is Inferencing Important?

There are two main reasons:

1. No user of a language can possibly know all the words, structures and expressions in the language so we have to infer meaning from what we do know. This is, naturally, especially important for learners of a language.
2. Very few texts, whether spoken or written, actually contain all the information we need fully to understand them. Speakers and writers will always assume some prior knowledge in their hearers and readers. If we didn't do this, texts would be interminably long. Try explaining how to make an omelette to someone who doesn't know anything about food, what a kitchen is or what it's likely to contain and you will see what's meant.

Extra-linguistic Knowledge

In order to understand the sign at the top of this page, you used no linguistic knowledge at all simply because no language was present. What you used was extra-linguistic knowledge. That is your knowledge of the world, people's motivations for informing you and your understanding of shape and movement.

Refining Extra-linguistic Knowledge

Extra-linguistic knowledge can be further refined:

• knowledge of the world this was what you used to understand the three simple shapes on the sign, the implied direction of movement and the purposes of the sign in general
• knowledge of people's motivations the assumption you used here was that a sign is intended by someone else to tell you something helpful
• knowledge of roles in society you assumed, probably rightly, that the people who designed it and had the sign put up were a) in some kind of authority and b) in possession of knowledge that you need, i.e., better informed

As an example of how these can be applied to text, try figuring out what this means: It's OK, ladies and gentlemen. You can go back to your offices now.

1. What is the meaning?
2. Who is speaking to whom?
3. Where is it happening?
4. What has just happened?
5. What happens next?
6. How did you know all this?

Click here when you have answered those questions. Most of the meaning and understanding of circumstances that you are able to extract from the language are not to do with language clues at all. You have deployed two types of knowledge to do all this.

Bottom-up Processing

You used this to figure out the import of OK, go back and now. If you were actually listening to the speaker, you would need to use your knowledge of the phonemes of English, of connected speech, of word meaning and word class and syntax.

Top-down Processing

You used this for everything else. Your sociolinguistic knowledge, your knowledge of the world, your understanding of social relationships and your ability to draw logical conclusions from linguistic clues are all facets of top-down knowledge that you bring to complete your understanding.

Processing in Combination

It is very important to understand that, although we have separated out the types of processing you did here, you did not use one type of processing and then the other; you combined the types to make meaning clear. That is how people do things.

Extra-linguistic Knowledge and Written Texts

As far as strategies are concerned, the same considerations apply to written text. We have more time and leisure to extract the meaning but fewer clues about the situation and role relationships to work on. As a result, we use less extra-linguistic knowledge to figure out meanings. That does not, however, mean that our knowledge of the world, our ability to draw logical conclusions and our knowledge of the social fabric around us are abandoned. An email from a friend and a letter from the tax man will set up completely different expectations in us and will be dealt with in different ways.

Reading Between the Lines

A lot of reading is actually reading between the lines, not simply extracting meaning from the written word. Take, for example, these snippets from British newspapers and see what they mean and what they imply. There are those who believe that the government's responsibility is to keep its citizens safe at all costs. This is an example of stating a fact in a way that implies the writer doesn't agree. Skilful readers will assume that the writer is going to go on to state an opposing view. The issue has ended up like that of the gas bill put behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Similes are commonly used in writing for effect. Taken at face value this simply means that an issue has been postponed but an alert reader will note that the writer has a point to make, i.e., that it shouldn't be postponed and action is needed now. Some types of text will require more knowledge of the world or a particular culture than others if they are going to be correctly interpreted:

• Pick Your Own Is not a request for you to go away and harvest your own vegetables and fruit; it is an invitation to come in and harvest some of mine (for a price).
• Please wait behind the yellow line until called forward Is not a polite request; it is an absolute imperative imposed by immigration officers the world over.

You can probably think of many more occasion when what you read needs to be interpreted by using extra-linguistic data. Advertising language is, of course, a rich source of such things