About this strategy
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.
The four activities
Each activity includes detailed teacher instructions, student-facing instructions, a worked example, reflection prompts, and extension ideas in the book.
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.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
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.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
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.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
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.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Get the full activities
The book includes complete instructions, reproducible student handouts, real student examples, reflection questions, and extension ideas for all four activities.
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