The Framework
The Six Reading Strategies
Developed through a research partnership with the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, these six strategies target different cognitive skills involved in reading. Each includes four classroom-ready activities with teacher instructions, student handouts, worked examples, and extension ideas.
Making Connections
Activating prior knowledge to build meaning
An important first step in introducing a new text to students is to leverage the resources that students bring to the classroom. By activating the prior knowledge of students — their context, history, prior readings and experiences — we can shortcut some of the process of explaining or explicitly teaching new ideas. Students make connections in three ways: text-to-self (links to personal experience), text-to-text (intertextual links), and text-to-world (connections to broader issues and events).
Activities
- Connections Coding Students annotate a text using symbols or colour coding to identify text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. They add brief margin notes to explain each connection, then discuss their annotations in groups or as a class.
- Connections Text Walk Students walk around the room visiting different stations, each featuring an extract from the central text. At each station they add annotations identifying connections, building on what previous students have written. The activity creates a layered, collaborative set of annotations.
- Context Walk A variation on the Text Walk that uses contextual documents surrounding the central text — reviews, author biographies, historical documents, images — to deliberately engineer text-to-text and text-to-world connections for students who may not have encountered them naturally.
- Connections Map Students create a visual map with the central text in the middle and connections radiating outward, organised by type (self, text, world). The map becomes a living document updated as students progress through the text, building a rich web of connections.
Visualising
Creating mental images to deepen comprehension
Visualising is the process of creating mental images from text. It is a multisensory strategy that goes beyond simply "seeing pictures" — it encompasses sounds, smells, textures and tastes associated with the words on the page. For some readers, visualising is automatic; for others, particularly those with aphantasia, it requires explicit instruction and scaffolding. These activities help students develop and articulate their mental imagery, improving comprehension and recall.
Activities
- Sensory Scenes Students annotate a text extract for sensory details across all five senses, then complete a graphic organiser with a drawing of the scene at the centre and written descriptions for sounds, smells, tastes and textures in surrounding sections. Different interpretations lead to rich class discussion about why readers form different impressions.
- Soundscapes Students create an aural landscape of a scene from the text using digital sound-editing tools such as GarageBand or Audacity. They annotate the text for explicit and implied sounds, source audio clips, and layer them together. Students finish with a brief written explanation of their choices.
- Line-by-Line Visualisation Students work in pairs, sitting back-to-back. One partner reads an extract aloud, pausing at each sentence, while the other draws the scene as it unfolds. They then swap roles and compare their drawings, noting similarities and differences in their visualisations of the same text.
- Reading in Role A dramatic activity where students prepare and perform a characterisation from a text extract. Students annotate the text with performance notes — posture, movement, voice, inner thoughts — then rehearse and perform. A reflection task asks what they learned about the author's portrayal of the character.
Questioning
Asking purposeful questions to drive deeper thinking
Questioning moves students from passive reading to active inquiry. Rather than answering questions set by the teacher, students learn to generate their own questions about the text — from simple knowledge-based queries to complex analytical and evaluative questions. The questioning strategy uses frameworks like Bloom's taxonomy to help students understand the different levels of questioning and develop the skills to interrogate texts independently.
Activities
- Four Questions Students learn four levels of questioning aligned with Bloom's taxonomy: knowledge and comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesising and evaluating. Working in pairs or groups of three, they write one question from each level about a text, making explicit that questioning goes far beyond simple comprehension.
- Why? Why? Why? Starting from a teacher-provided declarative statement about a text, students form a "Why…?" question, then swap with a partner to answer it. From each answer, a new "Why…?" question is derived, repeating three times. Students finish by writing a summary sentence incorporating all three layers.
- Text Interrogation Students interrogate a text from multiple angles using a three-layer concentric circle framework: the broad context (what was happening in the world), the author's context (who wrote it, their biases), and the issues, values and ideas present in the text.
- Deep Questions Completed at the end of a text study, students identify key moments and brainstorm five to ten questions at the analysis or synthesis level. Students share their best questions with the class, which are then categorised, discussed and refined. The richest questions can become actual assessment topics.
Inferring
Reading between the lines to uncover hidden meaning
Inferring highlighted a major gap in many English classrooms: teachers spend a lot of time teaching students what to think about texts, but not how to think. Inferring is the skill of drawing conclusions that are not explicitly stated in the text — reading between the lines. It requires students to combine textual evidence with their own knowledge and experience to construct meaning beyond the literal.
Activities
- QPCI Quote — Paraphrase — Connection — Inference. Students identify key quotes, paraphrase them, make a connection (text-to-self, text-to-text, or text-to-world), and finally write an inference about the author's values, character motivation or deeper meaning. This slows down the process of explaining a quote, moving students beyond simple paraphrase.
- Read Between the Lines Students work with a double-line-spaced extract and write a single sentence of analysis beneath each line, exploring meaning through connections, questions, visualisations or observations about the author's intent. This line-by-line approach forces students to dwell on the text and is particularly effective with poetry.
- Meaning Map A concept-mapping activity where students map all the deeper meanings in a text — phrased as questions, statements, or themes and values — with supporting evidence at the outermost level. Students articulate not just what they see in the text but why they have made that judgement.
- How Do They Feel? How Do You Know? Students identify moments where a character experiences a strong emotion, then demonstrate how the author has shown (rather than told) that emotion — through actions, behaviour, interactions or dialogue — supported by a direct quote. This builds empathy and inference simultaneously.
Summarising
Distilling key ideas with precision and clarity
Summarising and evaluating require students to identify the most important ideas in a text and express them concisely in their own words. Students often default to copying notes or texts verbatim, which requires little processing and results in less comprehension. These activities teach students to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details, and to condense meaning without losing accuracy — skills essential for academic writing and critical thinking.
Activities
- Guided Summary A structured five-step process: (1) underline passages containing main ideas, (2) write a list of the main ideas, (3) combine similar ideas together, (4) organise by order of importance, and (5) write the summary as a paragraph. Initially modelled by the teacher, responsibility is gradually released to students.
- Key Idea Paraphrase Students identify five key terms or ideas from a text, optionally find synonyms, and then use those key terms to write a new paragraph entirely in their own words. This goes beyond summary by requiring students to present key information in their own language.
- 10 Words or Less Students must summarise the key ideas of a text in a single sentence of 10 words or fewer. This forces extreme precision and accuracy with language. Different students will focus on different aspects — plot, theme, values — revealing varied but valid readings of the same text.
- Elevator Pitch Students "sell" the main idea of a text using a three-part pitch structure: "You know how…" (identify the problem), "Well, the author suggests…" (the argument or solution), and "In fact…" (summary of supporting evidence). This blends summarising with persuasive techniques.
Synthesising
Combining ideas to create new understanding
Synthesising is the most complex of the six strategies. It requires students to bring together ideas from multiple sources, combine them with their own thinking, and create something new — a new argument, a new perspective, or a new creative work. The activities in this chapter develop students' ability to manage and integrate multiple texts, building towards the kind of sustained, independent thinking required at senior levels.
Activities
- Mega Map A comprehensive mind map that pulls together all ideas from across a course of study — characterisation, narrative structure, language, imagery, symbolism, themes, author's values, context and key quotes. Students create connections between different "bubbles," developing new, deeper awareness of how the parts of a text contribute to the whole.
- Strategy Hub A graphic organiser that collects the key information from each of the five other strategies into one page. Students transfer key ideas from their prior Making Connections, Visualising, Questioning, Inferring and Summarising work into the relevant sections. At the centre, they write a short statement encapsulating the most important meaning of the text.
- Synthesising Mood Board Students create a collage of words, images, colours and textures that captures the essence of a text, drawing on multimodal resources. The mood board synthesises understanding of themes, characterisation, symbolism, style and narrative. It can be created physically or digitally using tools like Canva or Google Slides.
- The Text File A cumulative document that evolves over an entire unit of work, serving as a record of all interesting points, character observations, theme notes, key quotes and anything else the reader uncovers. Students constantly update and refine it. By senior school, creating a Text File should be the first thing students do when encountering a new text.