Ch.5 Learning to Make an Inference

Before reading this chapter, I never thought that I would have to teach students how to make inferences. I thought that making inferences was something that students would just know how to do. After reading the conversations that took place in the eleventh grade honors class and the struggling eleventh grade class I can understand how making inferences might be hard to do when looking at the literal facts alone.  What struggling students are failing to do is transacting the text, they do not create meaning based on what they know and what the author implies. Beers provides several ways in which teachers can help students make inferences, which include syntax surgery. I thought that the syntax surgery exercise would be helpful to students because they can see how inferences are made, they can also perform syntax surgery so they can understand how to make inferences on their own.