Literacy Tips and TricksPractical Strategies for Fostering Literacy Across the Content Areas

The It Says, I Say strategy is a great during- and after-reading tool to help students get beyond just “finding” information in a text. On the second page of this newsletter is a formal graphic organizer that students can use with this strategy. A piece of notebook paper with three labeled columns (“It Says,” “I Say,” and “And So”) works just as well. Prior to reading, the teacher poses three or four questions that require students to draw inferences. As students are reading, they jot notes into the three columns. For each question, students engage in the following process:

1. Students find sections in the reading that relate to the question.2. Students summarize the related information in the “It Says” column.3. Students write out their own thinking that builds on the portion that

they summarized. This goes in the “I Say” column.4. Students draw a conclusion that proposes to answer the question

using both the related information and their own thinking and write their conclusions is the “And So” column.

Once students have completed their charts, engaging them in discussion about what they’ve written can help their thinking to expand. Like all reading strategies, it is best to model the use of the strategy in numerous formats (teacher modeling, whole-class demonstration, small groups, partners, etc.) before students are asked to complete one on their own. Teachers should select short pieces of text that invite interpretation.

Good readers know that there is a great deal that is communicated in a text outside of the actual words on the page. They know that authors don’t spell out everything that they need the reader to know. Oftentimes, it is up to the reader to put the pieces together and come to conclusions on their own. Inference, the act of arriving at a conclusion based on evidence, is a sophisticated skill that requires that the reader comprehend the text they are reading and think about it deeply. According to Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman in Subjects Matter: Every Teacher’s Guide to Content-Area Reading, “struggling readers often see reading as simply taking in words, hoping they ‘receive’ the ‘correct’ meaning from the text. They aren’t aware that good reading requires a lot of inferring—going beyond the literal information presented and using inference to tease out its implications.” However, other students often “draw conclusions that appear unjustified or surprising to a more experienced reader.” But how do we encourage students to draw appropriate inferences using text-based evidence, their own background knowledge, and common sense? The It Says, I Say strategy can be a great way to explicitly help students understand how inferences are developed and how they help us as readers.

Inference—the art of reading between the lines

R E A D I N G

It Says, I Say strategy supports inferential reading

It Says…I Say…and So…Questions It Says I Say And SoRead the question. Find information from the text to help you

answer the question.Consider what you know about the information.

Put together the information from the text with what you know to answer the question.