LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
Yes. But I van imagine my children being clueless. English is our third language but I think that’s not the issue. They just haven’t read enough. They are consumers and aren’t accustomed to active reading.
The absolute best strategy for most reading comprehension struggles is read aloud. Active discussion is good too.
Or I also like to tell my high schoolers to be contrarian with the text. To argue against it, to try to prove it wrong, even to the point of bad faith. “You’re saying the book sucks - I want receipts. Tell me about it.” I don’t really have training in teaching english but I will happily pressure high schoolers into reading the books in English class.