How to Teach Inferring in Narrative: Strategies That Help Students Understand Characters

September 29, 2025

Can you imagine how dull most stories would be if you weren’t able to read between the lines to fully explore the characters who make the text come alive? If you didn’t know how to tap into a character’s emotions and thoughts, if you couldn’t read into their words and actions, if you were unable to understand their relationships with other characters? To truly comprehend any character, a reader must be able to infer as well as visualize, synthesize, analyze, and more.   

 Students benefit when we don’t just tell them to infer, but explicitly teach them how to do so. Most students need step-by-step guidance showing them how to go beyond what an author states directly, and explore a character’s words, actions, thoughts, and interactions. Learning how to read characters not only improves students’ reading comprehension but also provides them with valuable lessons in how to better understand the people they encounter throughout their lives.

What Does the Research Say?

When students learn how to relate to, empathize with, and reflect upon the characters they encounter in narrative texts, they become more thoughtful and independent readers. The ability to infer deepens readers’ comprehension of the overall text[1], allowing the reader to connect the reading to background knowledge, determine how characters change over the course of a story, probe a character’s beliefs and actions, explore what’s left unsaid, and more.

A reader’s maturity and lived experiences, of course, impacts their ability to understand characters’ emotions, but all students, even very young readers, can learn how to explore characters beyond what’s written literally on the page. And research shows that explicitly teaching strategies can improve all readers’ ability to understand characters, which turns students from passive readers into active thinkers[2]. 

Do My Students Need Reading Strategies for inferring?

As students read a narrative text, ask questions that help you determine if they are thinking deeply about a character’s feelings, traits, and motivations, as well as the relationships between characters. Can they describe how the character is feeling, drawing upon dialogue, actions, body language, etc.? Are they able to discuss how a character changes throughout the book? Do they have any theories about how a character might react in certain situations? If no, then you can explicitly teach strategies that help them strengthen their ability to build a fuller picture and deeper understanding of characters. 

How Do I Know Which Strategies to Teach to support inferring?

The best way to determine which strategies will best resonate with your students is to use a skill progression to guide your selection. For instance, if your students are just beginning to study characters, you’ll want to use strategies at the beginning of the skill progression. Whereas, if your students can infer about characters and synthesize across test, they are ready for a more nuanced study or a character’s complexity.

 Let’s look at a couple of strategies, one at the beginning and one near the end of the skill progression.

Beginning Strategy: Put on the Character’s Face

Skill Progression: Ready to develop a theory or interpretation about a character

Skills:   Inferring | Synthesizing

Strategy: Look at the expression on a character’s face in an illustration or photo. Make the face yourself and think, “What is the character feeling?”

 Prompts:

• What do you notice when you look carefully at the face of the character?

• How do you feel when you make that face?

• How do you feel when you see your classmates make that face?

• Can you check our feelings chart to find a word that matches that feeling?

Advanced Strategy: Be Aware When a Character is Unaware

Skill Progression:  Can name important textual details, ready to infer what characters feel.

Skills:   Determining Importance | Inferring

Strategy: Notice when you, as the reader, know more than the character does about what’s going on in the story. State what the character doesn’t know. Think about why it matters, what it might show about the character, and if it could present a problem.

Prompts:

• What is the character aware/unaware of?

• How does the character’s lack of awareness impact them?

• Does the character’s lack of awareness change how you think about them?

• Does the character’s lack of awareness change the story?

Strategies provide students with a doable step-by-step process that allows them to infer. With use, the strategies become automatic, and students apply them with ease and they no longer need to think through the steps—they can just use the skill to comprehend more deeply.

For more strategies to help students infer, including inferring to comprehend characters (and much more), check out The Reading Strategies Book 2.0. These strategies will help students not only become better readers, but more nuanced at understanding and interpreting the actions and feelings of people they encounter throughout their lives.

 Download your own set of reproducible student cards (like those seen in this blog post) designed to help students be independent with each strategy.

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[1]  Bourg et al., 1993; Phillips, 1988

[2] Emery & Milhalevich, 1992; Shannon, Kame’enui, & Baumann, 1988

REFERENCES

Bourg, T., Risden, K., Thompson, Sl., & Davis, E.C. (1993). The effects of an empathy-building strategy on 6th graders’ causal inferencing in narrative text comprehension. Poetics, 22, (12), 117-133.

Phillips, L.M. (1988). Young readers’ inference strategies in reading comprehension. Cognition and Instruction, 5(3), 193–222.

Emery, D.W., Milhalevich, C. (1992). Directed discussion of character perspectives. Literacy Research and Instruction, 31(4), 51–59.

Shannon, P., Kame’enui E.J., Baumann, J.F. (1988). An investigation of children’s ability to comprehend character motives.American Educational Research Journal, 25(3), 441–462.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 360–407.

Watts-Taffe, S., Fisher, P., & Blachowicz, C. (2017). Vocabulary instruction: Research and practice. In D. Fisher & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (4th ed.). Routledge.

National Reading Panel (US), National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (US). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for

reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.

Cervetti, G. N., Wright, T. S., & Hwang, H. (2016). Conceptual coherence, comprehension, and vocabulary acquisition: A knowledge effect? Reading and Writing, 29 (4), 761–779.

Wright, T. S., Cervetti, G. N., Wise, C., & McClung, N. A. (2022). The impact of knowledge-building through conceptually coherent read alouds on vocabulary and comprehension. Reading Psychology, 4 (1), 70–84.