Your Child Reads Every Night. Why Isn't Reading Getting Easier?
If you've recently attended Back-to-School Night, you may have heard a familiar recommendation:
“Have your child read for 20 minutes every night.”
It's good advice. Reading exposes children to new vocabulary, ideas, language, and knowledge—and gives them opportunities to become skilled readers.
So if your child reads every night, why isn't reading getting easier?
If your child struggles with reading, there's another question worth asking:
What is your child actually doing during those 20 minutes?
If a child doesn't have an effective way to figure out unfamiliar words, another 20 minutes of reading can simply become another 20 minutes of struggling.
Don't just count the minutes. Make the minutes count.
Listen to what happens when your child reaches a word they don't immediately recognize.
Do they look through the entire word or glance at the beginning and guess?
Do they connect the spellings with the sounds in the word?
Do they notice when what they've read doesn't make sense?
Do they try another pronunciation when their first attempt doesn't sound like a word they know?
Or do they immediately look to you for help with the word?
Those behaviors can tell you more about your child's reading than the number of minutes they spend with a book. They provide clues to why reading isn't getting easier even when your child reads every night.
Reading builds on language children already know
Long before children learn to read, they know thousands of spoken words.
A child may understand and use a word such as entertainment long before they can read it. The word itself may not be new—the written representation of the word is what is new and unknown.
This is fundamental to how I teach reading at Success Tutoring.
I use a Structured Linguistic Literacy approach (also known as speech to print). We begin with words children can say, listen to the sounds in those words, and connect those sounds with the letters that represent them.
Let' take a look at the word entertainment.
It's a long word, but we don't have to tackle the whole thing at once. We can work through it one part at a time:
en → ter → tain → ment
Within tain, we hear: /t/ /ā/ /n/
(/ā/ represents the long a sound as in cake.)
Those sounds are represented in writing as: t – ai – n
(The letters ai represent /ā/ in this word.)
But /ā/ isn't always spelled ai. Children will see words with the /ā/ sound spelled in different ways, such as play, table, eight, and they.
English is unique because sounds can be spelled with 1, 2, 3, or 4 letters and one sound can have different spellings. These are concepts children need to understand to become successful readers and spellers.
They are so important they are the first concepts I teach to my students -- even kindergarteners! Very often these concepts are not taught to students early on because they are considered too advanced to teach until later grades. The truth is teaching one letter spellings and one spelling per sound restricts what children can read and it confuses them when "advanced" concepts are introduced later on.
Why I don't wait for “mastery” before moving on
Research has long established the importance of helping children become aware of the individual sounds in spoken words and connecting that knowledge to reading and spelling. The National Reading Panel's review of reading research found that instruction in manipulating the sounds in spoken words improved both reading and spelling.
However, some approaches that begin with print use a carefully controlled sequence in which children spend considerable time practicing one spelling pattern, such as ai, before additional ones are introduced.
My approach is different.
I don't expect a child to completely master the ai spelling before encountering another way of representing /ā/.
Moving on to a new concept doesn't mean we're finished with the current one.
When a new spelling is introduced, previously introduced spellings will continue to appear as students read, spell, and write. In other words, after teaching the different ways /ā/ is spelled, children will see those different spellings in words as they read while they are learning a completely different sound-spelling connection.
This deliberate mixing of previous and newer learning is called interleaving.
Why do it?
Because real reading is interleaved.
A book doesn't tell a child, “Every word on this page contains the spelling you practiced today.”
Familiar and unfamiliar spellings, words, and meanings are all mixed together. The reader has to determine what they know that can help.
So instead of:
Learn it → master it → move on
learning looks more like:
Learn it → use it → add something new → see it again → use it in another situation
Rather than reading carefully controlled text, like decodable books, students read real-world articles and books with my support. This allows students to keep moving forward while continuing to strengthen earlier learning.
It can also make practice look a little messier. A child may hesitate or make more mistakes when the answer isn't predictable.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Getting everything right during practice isn't the same as being able to use what you've learned independently.
Recent literacy research supports this kind of mixed practice. A 2026 study by Nathan Clemens, Sharon Vaughn and colleagues examined second- through fourth-grade students with significant word-reading difficulties. Students receiving instruction that interleaved regular and variable sound-spelling relationships showed stronger performance on several measures of word-reading efficiency, including words they had not been directly taught.
Classroom research with third graders has also found advantages for interleaved spelling practice over practicing one spelling pattern at a time.
That's particularly important to me:
I don't want students to read only the words we've practiced together. My goal is to help them figure out unknown words tomorrow by using what they learned today.
When the first attempt doesn't sound right
Knowing sound-spelling connections isn't always enough to immediately identify a word.
As we've seen, English is too variable for that.
Sometimes a child makes a reasonable attempt and realizes:
“That doesn't sound like a word I know.”
Instead of immediately asking an adult for the answer, the child needs to learn to adjust the pronunciation and listen for a familiar spoken word.
Researchers call this set for variability.
Although the term sounds complicated; the idea isn't:
Read the word → listen → if it doesn't sound like a word you know, flex the sounds.
Research by William Tunmer and James Chapman found that this flexibility was related to children's later word-reading development. Children use words in their spoken vocabulary to help resolve unfamiliar print.
Eventually, reading begins to teach the child
Let’s go back to the word entertainment.
Your child may work through the sounds and spellings and pronounce ai as /a/ and /i/ separately, realize it's not a word they know, remember ai is one of the /ā/ spellings (or have it be told to them), adjust their pronunciation, and suddenly they recognize a word they know:
“Oh! Entertainment!”
They haven't only read the word. They've also learned something about how a word they already knew from speech is represented in print.
It may take one, a dozen, or even a hundred encounters with the word. Eventually, they will immediately recognize it and be able to read it effortlessly.
Reading researcher David Share calls this the self-teaching hypothesis.
Every time children successfully figure out an unfamiliar word, they have an opportunity to learn from that word.
It’s not possible to directly teach a child every word they will encounter during a lifetime of reading.
We don't need to.
We need to help children develop a process that increasingly allows them to learn new words through their own successful reading.
"Self-teaching” doesn't mean struggling alone
This is an important distinction—especially when your child is still developing an effective reading process.
Reading practice shouldn't mean handing a struggling reader a book, setting a timer for 20 minutes, and leaving them to figure everything out alone.
The goal isn't to make your child struggle until they discover the answer or to immediately tell them every word they don't know.
If your child reads a word incorrectly, correct it immediately. An incorrect word can change the meaning of the sentence, and repeatedly guessing or misreading words isn't the kind of practice we want to reinforce.
At the same time, you don't need to turn every mistake into a long lesson.
Provide just enough support and correction for them to successfully read the word.
For example, if your child is reading train and doesn't know the sound represented by part of a word, tell them the sound. Then have them go back to the beginning of the word, say the sounds from left to right, and blend them together. Do this each time they encounter a sound they don't know.
Work through longer words like entertainment in manageable parts: say the sounds in the first part and blend them, do the same with the next part(s), then put the parts together and read the whole word.
en → /e/ /n/
ter → /t/ /er/
tain → /t/ /ā/ /n/
ment → /m/ /e/ /n/ /t/
/en/ → /ter/ → /tain/ → /ment/ → entertainment
This process gives your child an opportunity to connect the spoken word with its written form—and that's what makes the self-teaching process possible.
As your child becomes more skilled, you’ll find they need less help from you.
So should your child still read 20 minutes every night?
Absolutely.
The advice you heard at Back-to-School Night wasn't wrong.
But for a struggling reader, I'd add two things:
Watch and listen to your child read.
Be available to help.
If your child is guessing, skipping words, repeatedly misreading words, or becoming increasingly frustrated, finishing the required minutes is less important than the quality of the reading.
Slow down. Correct errors. Supply information your child doesn't know. Help them successfully work through difficult words.
Any amount of time your child spends reading should be be filled with as much successful reading as possible.
Don’t just count the minutes. Make the minutes count.
That's when daily reading practice becomes effective.
Is your child putting in the reading time but still struggling?
If you're seeing guessing, slow and effortful reading, difficulty figuring out unfamiliar words, or frustration despite regular practice, more reading time alone may not address what's getting in the way.
Success Tutoring provides individualized online reading instruction that helps struggling readers develop a more effective and increasingly independent process for reading.
Research Behind These Ideas
Klimovich, M., & Richter, T. (2025). Using Interleaved Practice to Foster Spelling Acquisition. Learning and Instruction.A classroom study examining the effects of interleaved versus blocked spelling practice with third graders.
National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching Children to Read.A comprehensive review of reading research, including evidence concerning children's awareness and manipulation of sounds in spoken words and their reading and spelling development.
N. H., Boucher, A. N., Vaughn, S., et al. (2026). A Pilot Study Examining Elements to Improve Generalized Word Reading Skills for Students With Significant Word Reading Difficulties.A study of students in grades 2–4 comparing approaches to word-reading intervention, including the interleaving of regular and variable sound-spelling relationships.
Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological Recoding and Self-Teaching: Sine Qua Non of Reading Acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218.Introduced the self-teaching hypothesis explaining how successfully working through unfamiliar printed words contributes to learning their written forms.
Share, D. L. (1999). Phonological Recoding and Orthographic Learning: A Direct Test of the Self-Teaching Hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72(2), 95–129.Provided experimental evidence of children's learning about unfamiliar written words through successful reading encounters.
Tunmer, W. E., & Chapman, J. W. (2012). Does Set for Variability Mediate the Influence of Vocabulary Knowledge on the Development of Word Recognition Skills? Scientific Studies of Reading, 16(2), 122–140.Examined the relationship among spoken vocabulary, pronunciation flexibility, and word-reading development.
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