Nell Duke & Kelly B. Cartwright
The simple view of reading is commonly presented to educators in professional development about the science of reading. The simple view is a useful tool for conveying the undeniable importance – in fact necessity – of both decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading. Research in the 35 years since the theory was proposed has revealed additional understandings about reading.
This paper is by researchers who work in the field of the science of reading presents a logical argument about the utility of the Simple View of Reading (SVR), first proposed by Gough and Tunmer 35 years ago in 1986 (see Gough & Tunmer, 1986), while also providing a clear and convincing justification about the importance of providing teachers with access to the benefits of research conducted since the SRV was first proposed.
The paper accurately reviews the research literature to propose that three, well-researched and evidence-based dimensions of what we know about how ‘reader’ factors influence reading and learning to read should now be included in models of reading.
As well as providing the evidence for these arguments against providing teachers with access to a simplified and inadequate model of reading to inform their teaching of children, this paper also provides succinct and clear explanations of a diverse range of models of reading including:
- The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tumner, 1986) and more current updates such as that proposed by Nation (2019) and Hoover and Tumner (2020).
- The Rope Model (Scarborough, 2001)
- The DIME and DIER Models (Ahmed et al., 2016; Kim, 2017)
- The Componential Model of Reading (Joshi & Aaron, 2000)
Duke and Cartwright (2021) acknowledge that while their model helps to explain some dimensions of how people read and how young children can be supported to learn to read (the reader factors), they expect the model will need to be adapted or rejected as science learns more and our understandings move on. The Simple View of Reading was first proposed 35 years ago, and it is imperative that educators, researchers and policy writers are open to the latest evidence, and flexible enough to work with those new understandings.
Link: https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rrq.411