One way of making rereading more effective is to organize it around specific questions that call for a comparison between first and second reading, between response and critical interpretation. Readers will be asked to reexamine their position toward the story after second reading, to ponder some of the exclusions, distortions, misreadings they have perpetrated during first reading. They are also asked to speculate on how successfully they have attended to details, howq closely they have monitored the progress of the story through inferences, predictions, connections. Ideally, the reader should pursue an uninterrupted interpretative process, with an active, transformative rereading already implied in first reading. But in common practice, or in some of the current psychological and semiotic theories of interpretation, first and second reading are perceived as separate, even conflicting.
First reading is described as sequential, superficial, mimetic.
A critical-comparative rereading refocuses the reader's attention on the work as an elaborate structure of discourse, on the text's rhetoric and ideology usually missed in first reading. A successful reading will emerge from the interplay of naive absorption and critical reexamination, participation, and self-reflection. In addition, it must be noted that the principles of reading process theory have been adapted drastically, depending on the level of the class and the literary experience of the students.