You really probably just haven't read enough. Let me tell you my story. I'm a native English speaker, but I spent countless - day and night - hours reading stuff : US history, European history, politics, economics. Mostly books. The purpose? To bolster my SAT reading and writing score. You know the benefit of reading a lot, I mean a lot = reading one book a day consistently, that is 360+ books per year. The only drawback of that is the high cost - at one point I'd spend over $1000 per month just to buy books. At the end, I had so many examples to write on my SAT writing that I didn't even bother looking at any "strategies", "formula" ...\
On the exam, I just started throwing everything I read from whichever source, and I ended up writing more words than allotted - of course, I scored a 12 out of 12 (which is the same as 6.0 on AWA) For the SAT reading, I scored a 780 (out of 800), with not too much prep either.
Buy a Kindle (
https://www.amazon.com) if you have the opportunity. Saves you a lot of money, a $25 hardcopy is $9 on Kindle - you can always read it in a day and return it the next day for full refund. The good thing about Kindle is that it's thin and light - you can read while eating at a restaurant. My favorite route every day is to walk out and take the subway to a Whole Foods Market (where I can get countless fruits, smoothie and other goodies) , sit down with my book, eating, reading, eating, reading. Repeat the pattern every day. You can also hold the device without much pain while you're on the train - on the beach, anywhere. ALSO, it has a built-in dictionary that allows you to learn words way faster than reading off a paper back, for which you'd have to aid with an external dictionary to look up for words.
There's a reason why SAT verbal is highly correlated with socio-economic status of the individual in question. It is because that in high SES households, there tend to be a lot more books available. Moreover, books tend to be expensive, out of the reach of working class Americans. More analysis see Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" :
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-Sta ... 0307453421 Overall: Just Read.
US history, European history, politics, economics......
Kindly share those books name and author so that i can too give it a try...