Teacher Discussion Forums

I will be a teacher next year in China. During the university life I have learned a lot about the teaching methodology. But still I have some questions about teaching.
When we teach high school students, we find that the texts in their textbook are long. so how can a teacher teach the text? I mean, my teacher always tells us that as a new teacher we should be innovative and use new teaching methodology. So I want to know how can a teacher teach students when we have a long passage? Need we ask them to read sentence one by one and explain the difficult point or do we have some other good ways??
I hope anyone who has some ideas can give me his or her opinion. Thank you!

I often find the reading passages *seem* too long for my students, so I break them up into smaller bits. We read one or two paragraphs, discuss the words they don't understand, and then discuss the meaning by rephrasing or answering questions.

It, generally, only takes me a month to orient them to longer passages. It's more of a fear of the text than an inability to read and understand it.

If the problem is the actual length or vocabulary, you could either work on the new vocabulary first, or edit/rewrite the article before giving it to them.