The active reader has a sense of the writer at work behind a text, and can explain something about how a text is constructed, based on plenty of prior reading experience.
Pupils who are becoming active readers are able to pick out relevant points from different places in a text and support them with textual evidence. They make inferences drawing on evidence from across a text. In short, their responses are more securely rooted in the text than those of the competent reader.
The main shift, however, from the competent reader to the active one is that active readers have begun to understand the constructed nature of texts. They have progressed from being readers who engage with and respond to texts at face value to readers who actively recognise that the text is an artefact created by a writer in order to create an effect on the reader. They are beginning to sense the writer at work behind the text.