Reading Strategies

1) You will NOT get every word in the story, but keep on reading for the main ideas and events.  When there is something important in the details, your teacher will draw your attention to it in class.

2) Think about reading this text in cycles.  The first time through a part, it is fine if your reading is more a skimming for character names, setting/change of setting, main topics of paragraphs or of conversation sections.  In other words, get the skeleton.  The second time through add some muscle to connect the bones of your skeletal understanding of the text.  The third time through (if there needs to be one) you can worry about adding flesh and details.

3) In sections where there is dialog (direct speech) combined with narration; on your first reading, read just the dialog.  Dialog is often easier to understand since the lines are shorter and it is in the conversational language that is more familiar to you from your textbooks.
What the characters say to each other will give you a start in understanding what's going on.

Some procedural strategies

4) Read the comprehension questions for a section before doing the actual reading for the section.  What the questions are about will help you determine what to focus on on the pages.  The questions will also give you some ideas about what happens in a section.  When you can answer the questions you've understood the passage well enough for this level.

5) As you finish a section of text (a paragraph or a page), underline or put a note in the margins in English of what you DO understand about what is happening.  The note in the margin will be best since it will give you tell you the part of the text that gave you that idea.

6) In working through the narrative parts, talk yourself through the text.  Make yourself verbalize the words you understand (as opposed to verbalizing every word in the sentence -- which is essentially doing oral translation).

7) When reading don't stop on every unknown word.  Use the facing page glosses to help you, but if there are still words you don't know, keep on reading until you get to something that you do know.  If at the end of the paragraph there are still unknown words that are keeping you from understanding, pick several of them which you think might be key to making sense out of the section.  Keep writing notes to yourself in the margin in English focusing on what does make sense.