Which of the following methods can enhance a student's inference skills?

Enhancing a student's inference skills is greatly supported by encouraging predictions and drawing on prior knowledge. This approach enables students to make connections between what they have already learned and the new information they encounter in texts. When students are encouraged to predict outcomes or the meaning of a passage, they are actively engaging with the material, which stimulates critical thinking and comprehension.

By utilizing background knowledge, students can infer meanings and understand contexts better, as they relate new content to their existing knowledge base. This makes reading a more interactive and enriching experience, leading to deeper comprehension and the ability to make inferences about characters, settings, and themes within a text.

In contrast, ignoring a student's questions or limiting their exposure to various texts can stifle their curiosity and fail to provide the rich context needed for making inferences. Additionally, training students to avoid predictions hinders their ability to actively engage with the material, thereby limiting their overall reading comprehension skills. Therefore, the strategy of encouraging predictions and utilizing prior knowledge is essential for developing students' inference abilities effectively.