I imagine like this: by continually reading a lot, you develop in the unconscious some dictionary of expression patterns. The dictionary (part of it is that of collocations) is somewhat automatically shaped by the volume of unconsciously accumulated corpus.

You would sometimes come across an expression which seems it can read in several different senses. But with that inner dictionary developed, you would be able to read it correctly, because you know what is the most natural expression to be selected in the situation or context.

That is, you can discern like this:

"Well, true, you can read this sentence in the senses p, q, and r. But if you wanted to say in the sense q or r, you would surely choose other more suitable expressions. So, I'd say that by far the most likely sense of the sentence is p."

Just now I googled the word "askew" and seconds afterward felt amused. The same thing happened I entered the word in Japanese "斜め". I don't know if other jokes like this are there in Google retrieval.

How can I personally make my reading practice more effective?

For me, it could be to put more weight on the amount of reading than on maximization of understanding of text. It could be too much ambition for me to want full understanding of text at my current level of English skills. Therefore, it might look to be a roundabout way but might in fact be the fastest course for me to attain the required reading skill. In language learning, if the method is appropriate enough, quantity can make quality, maybe.

Trying to get the full understanding of text can make the reading exhausting and make me a bit reluctant to read it. But such a text would be not so readily readable one even if it were written in Japanese. This was what I overlooked. Now my grammatical knowledge and vocabulary would be fairly or way beyond elemntary levels, probably. So, what's effective is to put the energy selectively into reading understandable text or understandable part of text.

Seeking too much depth in understanding text may be impeding my purposefully quantitatively maximized reading ... in my currente situation. I should make it clear that what I think I need to attain the most now in my studying of English is more advanced WPM (words per minuite), i.e., speed reading.