The Simple View of Reading is, as the name suggests, a simple (but not
simplistic) representation of what the reading process entails, particularly
when viewed with the novice in mind. It was proposed over a generation ago, but
its timing could not have been worse, arriving as it did, during “Peak Whole
Language” in the mid-1980s. It seems to have by-passed a generation of teachers
in their pre-service education, but has thrived in cognitive psychology and
speech-language pathology circles, where it has informed theory, research, and
practice for the last three decades. Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my gripes is the ITE-auspiced erosion of teacher knowledge that has taken place in recent decades.
In this guest blogpost, retired Boston teacher Stephen Parker (@ParkerPhonics) takes a look at the Simple View of Reading, unpacks its key elements, and discusses its implications for reading instruction and for supporting struggling readers.
In this guest blogpost, retired Boston teacher Stephen Parker (@ParkerPhonics) takes a look at the Simple View of Reading, unpacks its key elements, and discusses its implications for reading instruction and for supporting struggling readers.
For many teachers, the Simple View of Reading was a gift that went
missing in the mail. Here it is, re-packaged and ready to assist in the start
of another Australian school year.
Note –
- You can download free copies of Stephen’s books on phonics instruction at his website.
- Stephen has now commenced his own blog, and this piece is published there as well. See this link.
*******
In
1986, Whole Language, a philosophy for teaching reading that rejected systematic
phonics, was approaching peak popularity. The two founders of Whole Language,
Ken Goodman and Frank Smith, had little patience for decoding, that is, for matching a sound with each letter (or letter
group) in a word and then blending those sounds together, left to right, to sound out the word.
Goodman believed that “Matching letters with sounds is a flat-earth view of the world, since it
rejects modern science about reading and writing and how they develop.” Smith added: “Reliance on phonics –
or spelling-to-sound correspondence – is dysfunctional in fluent reading and
interferes with learning to read”. Whole Language, in 1986, was nearly
universally accepted by the educational establishment and by reading teachers
everywhere.
All
the more surprising, therefore, that in that same year, Philip Gough and
William Tunmer proposed their Simple
View of Reading. Surprising because their model placed “decoding” front and
center, right along with “language comprehension,” as the two independent
factors necessary for a child to read. The model succinctly states:
R
= D x C
where
R stands for “reading comprehension,” D for “decoding.” and C for “language (listening)
comprehension.”
To
understand this model today, 33 years after it was proposed, it’s important to
know how Gough and Tunmer understood their three variables. It’s also important
to recognize that the numerical values assigned to the variables D and C are multiplied,
not added.
Language
comprehension (C) involves not only hearing words spoken by another, but
also understanding what was just
spoken. Reading comprehension (R), which comes later developmentally, is
exactly what everyone means when they speak about reading something: not only producing
the words (mentally or aloud), but also understanding
what was just read.
D
stands for two distinct types of “decoding”: the decoding done by a beginner (the
“sounding out” defined above) – as well as the decoding done by a skilled
reader. Skilled readers don’t sound out words, rather, they simply recognize
the words immediately, as “sight words.” These are sight words in the full
sense, meaning they were created automatically and unconsciously
precisely because the child was taught the letter-sound correspondences of the alphabetic
code and then used those correspondences – at least initially – to sound out
words.
In
other words, "skilled" decoding (automatic word recognition) directly depends
upon the child going through the process of “primitive” decoding (matching
letters with sounds and then blending those sounds to produce a pronunciation).
Gough
and Tunmer expressed it this way: “Word recognition skill is fundamentally
dependent upon knowledge of letter-sound correspondences…We assume that
decoding varies directly with knowledge of letter-sound correspondences.”
Since Gough and Tunmer referred to two distinct types of “comprehension” in their model, it will likely avoid some confusion if we take the liberty to rename two of the variables in the Simple View this way:
RC =
D x LC
Reading
Comprehension is the product of Decoding and Language Comprehension. The
variables D and LC in their model can each be assigned a numerical value that
ranges from 0 (no skill) to 1 (perfection). Those numbers are then multiplied
to determine RC (reading comprehension).
There’s
a lot to unpack here. First, when two numbers in the range 0 to 1 are
multiplied rather than added, the result will usually be a number smaller than
either of the multipliers (e.g. 1/2
x 1/4 =
1/8). I will present some examples below that demonstrate the
significance of this fact.
Second,
D and LC are independent of each other. For instance, I studied Spanish for two
years in high school nearly 50 years ago. Based on that experience, I can
decode Spanish text quite well (D = 1) but I can’t understand spoken Spanish (LC
= 0). So, in this case we have RC = D
x LC =
1 x 0
= 0. You can see then, that in
using this model, it’s quite possible to decode text, yet fail (completely) to read that text. Decoding is a necessary
but insufficient condition for reading.
Conversely,
a child can have perfectly good (age-appropriate) language comprehension skills
(LC = 1) yet have no decoding skill (D = 0). Many four and five-year-olds are living
examples of this. But knowing a language does not make one literate. In this
case, RC = D
x LC =
0 x 1
= 0. If D = 0, reading ability is
0 no matter how good language comprehension might be. Language Comprehension is
also a necessary but insufficient
condition for reading. The necessary AND sufficient condition for reading to
take place is that BOTH decoding (D) and language comprehension (LC) have values
greater than 0.
The
Ideal
The
ideal situation is one where a student attains, as quickly and efficiently as possible, a decoding score of 1. In such
a case, RC = D
x LC =
1 x LC
= LC, or simply: RC = LC.
In other words, once a child can fully and accurately decode the print on the
page into sound, even if that sound only unfolds in her head, her reading
comprehension (RC) will be every bit as good (or bad) as her current language
comprehension (LC). For her, it will be as though the text on the page were
being spoken by someone else.
As
D approaches 1, the finite task of “learning to read” evolves into the
life-long task of “reading to learn.” From this point on, her reading
comprehension (RC) and her language comprehension (LC) will increase in unison
(RC = LC). Reading about a new subject will improve her language skill just as conversation
about a new subject will improve her reading skill. A lifetime of learning via both
reading and conversation lies ahead, as “sounding out words” gives way to
“automatic word recognition.”
Less
Than Ideal (Dyslexia)
There
are many children in school – and countless adults in our communities – whose
language comprehension skills (LC) are fully (or nearly) appropriate for their
age (so 0.9 < LC < 1), but whose decoding skills are poor to non-existent
(so 0 < D < 0.2). These individuals might know a couple hundred
consciously-memorized sight words, but they don’t have the ability to
accurately sound out unfamiliar words. Therefore, their labored reading does
not create new sight words automatically, as previously discussed. Their
ability to engage with text is severely constrained – as are their educational
and vocational prospects.
For
this large population of poor decoders, the Simple View yields something like
this: RC
= D x
LC = 0.20
x 0.90 = 0.18.
Their reading comprehension (18%) will be poor indeed. Gough
and Tunmer called this condition “dyslexia.” Dyslexics can’t read because
they can’t decode.
“We
take no position on whether there are one or more ultimate causes of dyslexia. But
we suggest that there is a common denominator in every case of dyslexia… an
inability to decode. This is not to say that we claim to have identified the
ultimate cause of dyslexia; for this, one would have to push the question one
step back and ask why they cannot decode.”
Gough
and Tunmer conceded that the ultimate cause of dyslexia might well be genetic
and neurological, but they left open the possibility that dyslexia could also
result simply because the individual has never been taught, properly, how to
decode.
Less
Than Ideal (Poor Language Comprehension)
Reading
disability can occur the other way as well. A child can have relatively good
decoding skills (D = 0.9) but poor language comprehension skills (LC = 0.3). This
might be the case if the child comes from a disadvantaged background, or if the
child has a developmental disorder that compromises LC, or if English is a
second language. For him: RC =
D x LC
= 0.90 x 0.30 =
0.27. Again, we have a child who can barely read.
And,
of course, there are readers who are deficient in both decoding and
language comprehension. Here the Simple View yields the expected result:
RC =
D x LC
= 0.20 x 0.30 =
0.06, a child who is nearly illiterate and who needs support with both
decoding and language comprehension in order to make progress.
The
Simple View asserts only that both decoding (D) and language
comprehension (LC) are essential to reading. Note that this theory is easily
falsifiable. To counter the Simple View, one need only show:
1)
There are students with good decoding skills and good language comprehension
skills, but who nonetheless can’t read.
OR
2)
There are students who can do one but not the other and yet can still read with
skill and understanding.
Whole
Language instruction can be viewed as an attempt to falsify the Simple View in the
second way. If Whole Language founder Ken Goodman had been correct in his
assessment of reading as a psycholinguistic
guessing game, with little-to-no need of letter-sound knowledge and
decoding, Whole Language would have succeeded, at least with children having
good language comprehension (LC) skills. Instead, Whole Language failed.
In
the 33 years since Gough and Tunmer proposed the Simple View, no one has been
able to prove it false. In fact, experiments
show that the Simple View accounts for nearly all the variation in reading
comprehension found in the general population.
I
suspect the Simple View will never be falsified because it expresses, in a
single eloquent equation, something that is fundamentally common sense: that in
order to read alphabetic text, one must be able to transform that text into the
sound it symbolizes and then understand the result. Such text, after all, is
nothing more than sound that was previously encoded onto paper; decoding it,
and understanding it, is reading.
Implications
for Reading Instruction
Gough
and Tunmer were circumspect about the instructional implications of their
model of reading. In fact, they stated explicitly that they “do not wish to
discuss the place of decoding in reading instruction.” They were, after all,
trying to publish their model at the height of the Whole Language craze.
Nonetheless, one can get a hint of what they thought from the following:
“If
decoding plays a central role in the reading process, then it seems sensible to
give it a comparable place in instruction… If we were to learn that decoding
plays no role at all in skilled reading, it does not follow that we
should ignore decoding in reading instruction. It might well be that direct
instruction in Synthetic Phonics is the fastest route to skilled reading.”
Personally,
I think the implications of the Simple View for reading instruction are
unavoidable. Consider these two scenarios.
Scenario 1: During the critical first
two years of reading instruction, the bulk of time is spent on “invented
spellings,” “pretend reading,” rote-memorization of sight words, and lots of
guessing. (Children guess the meaning of unknown words based on pictures,
context, or the word’s first letter.) When enough sight words have been
consciously memorized, analytic phonics is used to have the children analyze
those sight words and gradually “discover” the letter-sound correspondences of
the code.
Under
the best of circumstances, this type of teaching can increase a given child’s
decoding score (D) from 0 to near 1 over
a period of about 6 years. (See, for example, Words Their Way by Donald Bear.) At the end of this period, RC will
equal LC and the children who remain will be fully capable of “reading to
learn.” I say “children who remain” because many children will have given up on
reading in the first two years due to all the tedious sight word memorization
and guessing. (Note: What I have just briefly sketched out here is
today’s Balanced Literacy.)
Scenario 2: The teacher spends
the first two critical years directly and systematically teaching the
letter-sound correspondences of the alphabetic code to all students. Such
instruction goes by the name phonics-first or Synthetic Phonics. From Day 1, students are taught not only the
code, but also two critically important phonemic awareness skills: blending (for reading) and segmenting (for spelling).
In
a Synthetic Phonics program, students can reach the ideal (D = 1, RC = LC) and
be on their way to a lifetime of learning, in two years rather than in six. In addition, less students will give
up on reading because Synthetic Phonics logically explains spellings right from
the start – and the hated drudgery of consciously learning sight words is
bypassed entirely.
To
forestall the criticism that Synthetic Phonics spends two years on decoding (D)
while ignoring the child’s language comprehension skills (LC), I’ll add the
following. Every day, a Synthetic Phonics class should be split (roughly) in
half – the first part devoted to explicit teaching of the code, and the second
to the reading of classic children’s literature. The reading, however, is done by the teacher for the whole class, and
it allows plenty of time for discussion about what was just read. In this
manner, both D and LC increase daily, for every child, during the two years
required to complete Synthetic Phonics.
There is
but one way to teach reading that fully aligns with the Simple View. That way
is Synthetic Phonics.
©
Stephen Parker & Pamela Snow (2019)