Decoding the Simple View of Reading

Dec 16, 2022

Philip Gough proposed the simple view of reading after the Great Debate in the 1960s to argue for systematic, explicit phonics instruction as the appropriate focus for early reading instruction. This view was proposed as a corrective to the extant characterization of reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game.” Scientific research has found major problems with the simple view and the guessing game metaphor, though the simple view is still potent.

The following comes from an article published in 1986 by Gough and Tunmer in the Journal of Remedial and Special Education (Vol. 7, No. 1):

Gough’s last name was a challenge to my students in a reading specialist program to pronounce. Is it Goo, as in through? Guff as in rough? Go as in thought? Gaw as in sought? Gow as in mouth? Let us turn now to phonics, I would say.

Hoover and Gough (1990) complicated this simple matter writing for a different academic audience, not an audience of special educators. The following quote comes from a piece published in Reading and Writing (Vol. 2, No. 2). Note that in this article, the Simple View shifts on the left side of the equation. Instead of decoding plus comprehension = reading, the equation reads “decoding plus linguistic comprehension = reading.”

The original terms “decoding” and “comprehension”in the formula have long troubled me. For one thing, I don’t conceive of reading as additive, but interactive with reciprocal sub processes.

For another, switching the formula to “comprehension + decoding = reading” shouldn’t change anything, but it does. Gough’s view puts decoding in first position, a prerequisite for comprehension. But comprehension precedes decoding developmentally and plays a role in decoding words in context. Children spend the first five years becoming expert at linguistic comprehension. Decoding suddenly becomes a brake on comprehension when teachers phonics instruction crowds out language and writing instruction.

Just as language systems, vocabulary growth, and comprehension feed upon one another, especially during infancy and early childhood, language systems, vocabulary growth, and comprehension work together to deepen and strengthen underlying parts of reading like motivation, metacognition, and prior knowledge. If anything, reading aloud to children, theatrical renditions of texts, subject matter exploration, and writing, including handwriting, should be curricular non-negotiables on par with phonics.

“Linguistic” comprehension has two sources, oral language and written language, a small change in diction that makes the simple view much more complex: { [decoding + listening = reading] + [decoding + reading = comprehension] = language comprehension}. Hoover and Gough (1990) seem to concur:

I’m fascinated by the doubling down on the simplicity of the “simple view simply holding that these complexities” can be separated out. Separated out—for what purpose? So decoding can dominate pedagogy in the early grades and supplant growth in language, genre knowledge, world knowledge, and vocabulary?

Scholarly interest in unpacking the relationship between listening and reading comprehension runs deep. In 1940, Harry Goldstein studied differences between reading and listening as separate routes to comprehension not because folks were debating how best to teach early reading, but because new technology was changing the way people got information:

The radio changed the way people listened, exposing listening comprehension as multifaceted in itself. Instead of speaking to one another face to face, person to person, often against a backdrop of shared experiences and knowledge, mostly in a non-linear hopscotch, the radio changed things up; one party did the listening, the other spoke to unknown others through a “speaker” in a way more like reading than talking.

Goldstein was concerned about distortions introduced in his study because of unnatural laboratory settings for the reading and listening performances he examined. In the following quote he presages worries amplified in later decades about studying naturally occurring behaviors under laboratory conditions (see Labov, 1971, Language in the Inner City). His finding presented in the final sentence holds significance for SoR today, which relies heavily of artificial experiments:

Listening comprehension is superior to reading comprehension, but this superiority “diminishes with increasing difficulty of materials.” Goldstein took a stab at theorizing what it might mean for instruction when there is a difference between listening and reading comprehension:

Goldstein is careful to foreground for his readers “the fact that the reading and listening situations…are not quite typical,” by which he references artificial lab conditions. He did his work before seminal research like Ways With Words (Heath, 1983) and Meaningful Differences (Hart and Ridley, 1995) excavated important differences in language socialization and vocabulary that have profound implications for first grade pedagogy related to sociocultural and economic differences in the early childhood years. Nonetheless, Goldstein’s conclusions are more complicated than the simple view:

Eighty years later, Cervetti, Palinscar, Pearson, Afflerbach et al. (2020)1 synthesized findings from a $120 million research project called the Reading for Understanding Initiative (RfU) partly to examine the Simple View of Reading and its underlying components. Sustained research across the country broadened empirical questions about the Simple View to middle school and high school readers.

This report makes clear that the Simple View is a useful heuristic—I was glad to read this conclusion because I used it in multiple contexts in my assessment course, as I’ve said—but expands the elements of the equation. Decoding and listening comprehension do impact reading. However, both decoding and listening comprehension derive from an underlying resource, i.e., language. Language develops naturally. But academic language is learned in school.

“When we encounter unqualified assertions made by popularizers of the science of reading, such as claims that only decoding needs to be taught because language comprehension develops naturally (Hanford, 2018a), then we conclude that the SVR is being misrepresented and oversimplified in the debate.”

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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