Why “Read More” Isn’t Enough

If you have a child in senior primary or secondary school in Melbourne, you’ve heard the advice a hundred times: they need to read more. Teachers say it. Tutors say it. We say it too at our English classes in Camberwell. And it’s true, but on its own, “read more” is not very helpful advice.

The problem is that “read more” has quietly come to mean one thing: read more chapter books. And for many of the families we work with, that’s exactly where it falls apart. Their children are busy, school, two or three sports, an instrument or two, family travel in the holidays. A novel demands a long, sustained commitment, and when there’s no realistic half hour a night to give it, reading becomes all-or-nothing. Too often, it becomes nothing.

There’s another problem: not all reading builds the same reading skills. A student who only ever reads novels can still be caught out by a timed reading comprehension paper — the kind that decides NAPLAN results, scholarship exams and selective school entry. And a student who only ever does comprehension worksheets never develops the reading stamina, vocabulary or love of story that novels provide. Different types of reading train different muscles, and a strong reader needs all of them.

Here are the four types of reading we build into our English reading program for primary and secondary students, and what each one actually does.

Chapter books: building reading stamina

This is the reading everyone thinks of. From Grade 2 up, every class in our program reads a chapter book across the term as part of homework, a few chapters at a time, with novel study questions along the way.

Long-form reading is where students learn to hold a story in their heads over weeks: to track characters as they change, follow a plot through its slow build, and meet rich vocabulary again and again in context. It’s also where reading endurance comes from. NAPLAN, scholarship and selective entry exams, and every year of secondary English under the Victorian Curriculum demand that students sit with long, dense text without tiring, and there is no shortcut to that other than doing it.

Timed reading comprehension: speed under exam pressure

Every other week in class, our students complete a short, sharp reading comprehension piece, about ten minutes, deliberately timed. The time pressure is the point. It trains students to read faster, skim for the shape of a text, and locate specific information quickly instead of re-reading everything from the top.

These are exactly the skills that timed tests reward. In a scholarship exam or a selective school reading test, students don’t have the luxury of a leisurely read; they need to find the answer, check it, and move on. Reading speed and precision are trainable, but only if students practise reading comprehension with a clock running.

Extended comprehension: inference and deep analysis

Alongside the quick read sits its opposite: a longer reading comprehension task of around half an hour. Here the questions go beyond “find the fact” and into inference, interpretation, and justification. What does the author suggest? How do you know? What effect does this word choice create?

This is slow, careful, close reading, and it’s the foundation of secondary school English. Students learn to support an answer with evidence from the text, to read between the lines, and to write about what they’ve read, not just recall it. For students aiming at scholarship and selective entry exams, this is where the top marks are separated from the middle.

Short stories: whole-text analysis in a single sitting

Recently, in one of our secondary English classes in Camberwell, the teacher spent a session doing close text analysis of a short story and it crystallised something for us. A novel can’t be studied whole in a two-hour lesson. A comprehension passage is complete, but it’s an extract, a fragment with no real beginning or end. A short story is the only form that gives students an entire work of literature, start to finish, in a single sitting.

That makes it uniquely powerful. In one story, students can see the whole architecture of fiction at once: how an author opens, plants clues, builds tension, turns the story, and lands an ending. That’s whole-text analysis — the kind secondary English constantly asks for — and it simply isn’t possible with chapter three of a novel.

Short stories are also the most realistic reading for busy students, and one of the best answers to the question parents ask us most: how do I get my child to read more? A short story is fifteen to forty minutes of reading. One car trip, one quiet Sunday morning, and it’s finished. Done. For a reluctant reader, that completed story is a genuine win, and wins are what build readers. Short stories also let students range across far more genres, authors and voices in a term than any single novel could. And because great short story writers must do everything — character, setting, tension, resolution — in a few thousand words, the writing is extraordinarily concentrated: every sentence earns its place. That’s exactly the quality of writing we want students absorbing before they write their own.

How our English reading program works

Our English classes for kids already cover three of the four: a chapter book each term for homework, and both the ten-minute timed comprehension and the half-hour extended comprehension in class. We’re now weaving short stories into the mix for senior primary and secondary students — complete works they can read, finish, and analyse as whole texts.

Together, the four types cover the full range of reading skills: stamina from novels, speed from timed reading comprehension, analytical depth from extended comprehension, and whole-text understanding from short stories.

How busy families can build reading skills at home

You don’t need to carve out an hour a night. If your child is busy, work with the time you actually have. Keep a short story collection or two around the house. They suit fifteen-minute pockets of time that a novel can’t use. Count everything as reading: stories, quality journalism, narrative non-fiction. And when your child does finish something, ask about it, not “did you read?” but “what happened? was the ending any good?” A finished story worth talking about does more for a young reader than an abandoned novel ever will.

“Read more” is still good advice. But “read differently” might be better.

Real Mandarin runs small-group English and Mandarin classes for children in Camberwell, Melbourne, with a reading program aligned to the Victorian Curriculum. If you’d like to see how the four types of reading work in a real class or want short story recommendations for your child’s age, book a free trial and pre-enrolment assessment, with no pressure.

Jingyi Jiang

Jingyi Jiang is the founder and director of Real Mandarin, a Mandarin and English tutoring school in Camberwell.