The Simple View of Reading

I give lots of workshops all over the country and I give them on all different aspects of struggling reading. And I start every single workshop with the same introduction and it’s called the Simple View of Reading. It’s research that is the most important research in my opinion, that’s ever been done on reading because it clarifies very clearly what good readers do well and what those who don’t read so well struggle with. And the simple view of reading is research that was first done in 1990. It was proposed in 1986, and it’s been replicated hundreds of times since then. People have tried to disprove it and they’ve tried to prove it. They can only prove it. They cannot disprove the simple view of reading. And what it says simply is that reading is made of two components, decoding and language comprehension. In order to be strong at reading comprehension, you got to be strong at decoding and you got to have background knowledge and understand the words that you’re reading. 

If you are the most brilliant person in the world and you understand physics and you can draw pictures and you can’t decode the words, you can’t achieve reading comprehension. You only have language comprehension. Decoding is also a critical skill. You must be able to read the words accurately. I work in Africa sometimes helping develop programs for languages that children in rural Africa speak. They’re languages I don’t speak. Fulfulde, Kanuri, Wolof, Pulaar. They have what’s called a transparent orthography. That means one letter always spells the same sound, not like English, where one letter can spell a number of sounds. I can decode those languages perfectly. You tell me that a ‘c’ spells ‘cha’ and I can read any word because the vowel, the vowel ‘a’ always spells ‘ah.’ The vowel ‘o’ always spells ‘oh’. So I can read ‘Cho.’ I don’t have a clue what those words say. I don’t know one word in Wolof, but I can read a whole page. I can decode a whole page. So I’ve got decoding, but I don’t have any language. I can’t get to reading comprehension. So the simple view of reading tells us two things. We have to be strong in decoding and we have to have strong language knowledge. We have to know something that helps us know what the words are. Researchers all know about the simple view of reading teachers don’t know 

About, and it’s the most important thing that teachers, if they would understand that students must be strong decoders. That means you don’t guess your way through material. You can decode unfamiliar words. It means that you know what you’re reading about. They would understand then that if you have a tier two student, meaning that student has a little bit of reading problem, not a severe reading problem, they would not say all tier two students go into the same program. “Oh, you’re a tier two student and you are in third grade. We’re going to put you in Read Naturally.” Read Naturally is right for some students, but we don’t know because all we have is that they’re a tier two student, meaning they’re behind in reading comprehension. We got to dig further and find out is that a decoding problem or is that a language problem? And we teach those two things separately and we test those two things separately. 

And that’s something that teachers, they don’t carry that with them. And if teachers could carry that with them, they would, number one know they’ve got to teach decoding until it’s very strong. They cannot let kids guess their way through text. The second thing they would know is that when a student isn’t performing as well as we want them to we don’t say what’s wrong with their reading comprehension. We say, “I wonder if the problem is decoding or language comprehension?” And that is the most important knowledge that we have from research that is absolutely applicable to teaching that teachers don’t know about. If teachers understood the simple view of reading, they would know that when a child has a reading difficulty, they’re not performing as well as we want them to on a reading test. We have to dig deeper. And the first thing we ask is, is the problem that the student has difficulty decoding? Is the problem that the student doesn’t understand what they’re reading or do they have both problems? And if they have both, then we have to address them differently with separate kinds of interventions. Decoding is finite and we teach decoding. You can read words that you don’t even know what they mean. You’re a strong decoder if you can decode ‘em. I’m a really good decoder in Wolof, Fulfulde, and Kanuri. Don’t know anything about the language, but I’m very strong decoder even in those languages. 

If the problem is language, obviously for me, the problem is I have no vocabulary, so that would be easy. Teacher what the words mean. If I get a student who speaks English and I know that they have a language problem and how do I know they have a language problem because the reading scores are low and they’re strong decoders, it’s simple algebra. It has to be language. The problem has to be language. Well then just like the simple view of reading says, well, the problem’s reading. Is it decoding or language? If a student has a weakness in language, I ask two questions. Is it a vocabulary, background, knowledge, difficulty, weakness, which is relatively easy to fix? Or is it reasoning and syntax that the student just doesn’t get it even though they know what the words mean, but they just miss the idea? One is pretty easy to fix, the other is more difficult to fix. There are a number of tools that we can use. Unlike decoding language is not finite. Every day we’re all learning something new. Just by experience we’re adding to our language comprehension. 

It’s very complex and it’s very simple. And the reason I say that is it’s complex to figure out exactly where the issue is, but it’s very simple. Once you find the issue, you know exactly what to do. Lemme give you an example. I was working in a ninth grade special education language arts class, and there were 11 students. Nine of them had decoding issues very apparent. So we’re going to fix their decoding, put them in decoding intervention. Two of them had comprehension issues. One of the ways that when I don’t have extensive information, I try to figure out, I just ask students, can you read a paragraph? If there’s strong decoders, which these kids were, these two were strong decoders, and tell me what you just read. They read a paragraph about alligators and how long they had been in southeastern Southern and southeastern America, United States and all about that. So the first girl read it and she read it and I asked her, please tell me what you read. And she said It was a million years. So I said, can you tell me anything else you read alligators? 

So she really clearly is reading and not getting a whole picture of what she’s reading. Oh, boy, read. He read the passage and I said, “can you please tell me what you read?” “We have alligators in an hour by you right down the house from us, and there are alligators. Sometimes when they’re babies, they only weigh however much they weigh, but they weigh, oh my gosh, they can weigh however much they can weigh.” He knew so much about alligators, but he didn’t tell me anything. He read. He told me just what he knew. So he had exactly the opposite problem that I am not going to work with them the same. So the way I start with this is I teach kids how to describe a picture. So I held up a picture of a kangaroo and there’s a big kangaroo and there’s a little tree, few trees in the background, some brown at the bottom. 

I said to the girl, could you please describe this picture? She said, there are three trees. She just goes to some detail she didn’t even know how to describe. Okay, so then I called the boy up and I said, could you please describe this picture? Oh, that’s in Australia. Now that picture, it might be in Australia, but he’s going to bring all of, so I have to address their problems very differently. However, I’m going to use a picture at first to get them to focus on the picture to tell me about the picture. One of ‘em, I have to keep him in the picture. The other one, I have to show her how to describe different things. And that’s just the best example that I can come up with right now to show you how a reading comprehension, a language comprehension problem can be, children can have a low score, and yet the reason for exactly the same low score is very different.