Before the age of the “talkies”, there was the silent movie era where movie stars graced the silver screen minus any sound except for the sound of some pianist in the movie theater. Occasionally, you will see some text dialog appear on screen so that the audience can keep pace with the story. Some of us may have watched videos or movies with the volume turned off. Of course it is strange to be watching the moving pictures without the sound. But with the pictures, we can still make good inferences about the possible dialog or even story line.

We can use this approach for teaching inference skills to our students. Choose an appropriate video. It can be clips  a documentary or a news broadcast or even a short story. I would not recommend a long one for practical reasons.

Play the video in your class with the intention that the students use the visual clues to guess what is being said. The students can be asked to pay attention to familiar scenes or faces for contextualizing. The students can be reminded to use their prior knowledge of things to make more sense of what they are viewing.

Get them to write in groups a possible script for the video clip that they have seen. Replay the clip as and when is necessary. Get the class to share their script by reading it as the clip is being replayed. When they have done so, show the clip with volume on.

Get the rest of the students to compare the student-created scripts against the original video clip’s script. How similar were their scripts to the original and how different were they? Remember this is not about getting an exact match. It is about getting something which is reasonable and acceptable and consistent with the visual clues they see in the clip. This is what making inferences is all about.