A Reading Comprehension Strategy for Challenging Texts

I once spent several months with one student reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream with one student as practice for analyzing Shakespeare. We didn’t rely on any outside notes or annotations. The goal was to use the text and only the text for comprehension. We read it in short sections, then tried to understand what the text meant. When we failed at understanding, we made notes of which lines in the scene made no sense, and then we kept reading. The next session, we came back to the same place, re-read the challenging portions and kept going. Over time, as we read through the text, the amount of confusing and challenging portions gradually dwindled to nothing. Those portions that we didn’t understand fully, we had the general idea of, and those that we never understood could be considered irrelevant at some point. My student showed comprehension of perhaps 90% of that text without any additional supportive documents or Googling and we finished the play within a few months. This is my preferred approach for understanding challenging texts in any literary field.