Back to: EC1. Building Emergent Literacy
Lesson Overview
Phillip Gough and William Tunmer’s Simple View of Reading theory identifies two broad skills predicting reading comprehension. Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, a model that expands on the Simple View of Reading, provides a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the components contributing to skilled reading. This lesson will explain the Simple View of Reading, now considered one of the most research-supported reading frameworks, and the Reading Rope. We will also reiterate the importance of building a solid literacy foundation to support later reading comprehension, a responsibility that lies at the heart of your work with young children.
Estimated Time: 30 Minutes
Reflection:
Have you ever found yourself pondering the components of reading that young children start to develop before they even step foot in a kindergarten classroom? What specific skills do you believe are crucial for young children to acquire in order to eventually read words with precision, fluency, and understanding?
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The Simple View of Reading
The Simple View of Reading is represented as a formula where Reading Comprehension is the product of Word Recognition and Language Comprehension.
WR
The ability to transform print into spoken language
Word
Recognition
x
LC
The ability to understand spoken language
Language Comprehension
=
RC
The ability to understand written language
Reading Comprehension
The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986)
Reflection:
What are the two critical skills the Simple View of Reading tells us children need to comprehend written text? Does this match your pre-existing knowledge about reading comprehension development?
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A Multiplication Problem that Predicts Reading Comprehension
The Simple View formula underscores the importance of an individual’s decoding and language comprehension abilities in predicting their reading comprehension. The formula’s numerical values associated with word recognition and language comprehension, ranging between 0 (no skill or ability) and 1 (perfection), play a pivotal role in this prediction. These values are then multiplied to determine reading comprehension, highlighting their significance.
Understanding the multiplicative nature of the Simple View formula is crucial. It vividly demonstrates how weaknesses in one or both domains can severely worsen reading comprehension. For instance, if a child has no reading skill (0) but perfect language comprehension (1), the child’s ability to gain meaning from text will be zero. This underscores the importance of addressing any weaknesses in these areas.
Activity:
Interact with the Simple View of Reading formula by typing in various values for word recognition and language comprehension in the boxes below and see predicted reading comprehension outcomes.
Simple View of Reading Formula
The Simple View of Reading formula shows that without adequately developed language AND skilled word recognition, it is impossible to read with proficiency. Likewise, children with deficits in word-level reading, language comprehension, or both, cannot develop good reading skills without building the prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for their reading success. Knowing what skills are required for skilled reading can help early childhood educators focus instruction on skills that are likely to lead to strong reading comprehension.
“A clearer understanding of reading paves the way for more efficient and effective instruction.”
Listen to Dr. Laura Justice connect the Simple View of Reading with teaching critical skills that underlie later reading comprehension.
The Simple View of Reading
Research upholds the Simple View of Reading and its wide-ranging instructional implications, including the role of decoding in reading instruction. However, you might find the Simple View of Reading to be, well, a bit too simple. Is the reading process truly as straightforward as it seems? The answer is a complex one. While the Simple View of Reading is a well-validated framework for capturing individual differences in reading comprehension, it was never meant to be a comprehensive theory of all the intricate processes involved in reading (Tunmer & Chapman, 2012). Instead, the Simple View of Reading presents the reading process and its components from a broad perspective. Each element of skilled reading – word recognition and language comprehension- is a complex entity with numerous subcomponents, many of which start to develop from birth, a detail that the Simple View of Reading does not explicitly mention.
Reading Rope
In 2001, Dr. Hollis Scarborough created an infographic that expanded upon the Simple View of Reading. The infographic below, referred to as the Reading Rope, unravels the complex subskills underlying word recognition and language comprehension. Scarborough’s Reading Rope (2001) offers more insight into the general ideas that the Simple View of Reading represents. Whereas the Simple View of Reading is primarily concerned with explaining reading skills at one point in time, the Reading Rope emphasizes reading development over time and the changing nature of the relationships among the developing skills. Understanding Scarborough’s Rope can help educators conceptualize differences in reading development, including ways to strengthen literacy skills along the developmental continuum. Early childhood educators can use the Reading Rope as a framework to guide instruction of the multiple skills that comprise language comprehension and lead to strong word recognition.
"Reading is a highly complex task that involves many interconnected and codependent linguistic processes that draw upon a variety of separate skills."
Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001)
Scarborough’s Reading Rope illustrates how reading is like a rope woven of many strands. The unraveled strands represent the subskills of reading. The lower strands include all of the skills encompassing word recognition— phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words. The upper strands consist of the abilities that encompass language comprehension—they focus on background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.
The Reading Rope uses twisting strands of rope to illustrate how the reading subskills combine in an increasingly strategic and automatic manner as children learn to read. The subskills start out separate in the early phases of reading development. Through gradual instruction and practice, the individual strands begin to interact and integrate into one of two primary cords. These cords, representing word recognition and language comprehension, are the key to skillful reading. A strong, tightly woven rope enables us to read fluently and understand what we read. Poorly developed subskills can weaken the rope’s structural integrity, resulting in reading comprehension problems.
Ohio's Early Learning and Development Standards
The complex subskills underlying word recognition and language comprehension identified in Scarborough’s Reading Rope are represented throughout Ohio’s Early Learning and Development Standards. They are evident in the following areas of the standards: Language and Communication, Phonological Awareness, and Print Awareness.
The following sections will describe the elements represented in the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope leading to strategic language comprehension, accurate word recognition, and ultimately good reading comprehension.
Language Comprehension
Subskills within
Language Comprehension
Use your mouse to hover over the subskills for more information.
Vocabulary
Background Knowledge
Language Structures
Verbal Reasoning
Literacy Knowledge
Language comprehension, a pivotal skill in understanding spoken and written language, holds immense significance in early childhood development. As detailed to the right, it encompasses a person’s background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.
Language comprehension abilities begin to form early in life and continue to expand across the lifespan. Babies and young children initially develop language comprehension through oral language and the experiences they encounter in their early years. Most children acquire complex language skills before they even learn to read.
To develop language and vocabulary skills, young children need to be consistently exposed to language-rich experiences and new words, used in various contexts. With a solid vocabulary and growing content knowledge, learning new information and developing inferences becomes easier. In preschool and the primary years, shared book reading, asking and answering questions, and engaging children in conversational turns are crucial methods to enhance their vocabulary, knowledge, inferential thinking, and familiarity with complex syntactic structures. Children start to apply their language comprehension skills to written text in primary school as their decoding skills improve. With more learning and reading experiences, children become more strategic in using language comprehension skills to understand what they read. A strong foundation of language comprehension and its essential components enhances children’s ability to apply knowledge and reasoning skills to construct meaning from text.
Word Recognition
Subskills within
Word Recognition
Use your mouse to hover over the subskills for more information.
Phonological Awareness
Decoding
Sight Word Recognition
Word recognition, a fundamental skill in reading, is the accurate and rapid retrieval of decoded word forms (Moats & Tolman, 2019). It involves translating written words into their spoken forms, a process known as decoding. This skill is crucial for reading comprehension, as a reader’s word recognition must be both accurate and automatic. The word reading process is supported by specific skills or strands, including phonological awareness, phonics/decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words. When a child is proficient in these underlying skills, they can read words correctly and instantaneously. Skilled readers have automatic access to almost all the words they encounter, allowing them to focus more on comprehension.
While a very small percentage of students may naturally develop word recognition skills through exposure to books, most do not. The human brain is not inherently wired for reading as it is for speaking or using language. This is where the pivotal role of educators and caregivers shines. It is through their direct, systematic, and structured teaching of word recognition (and its component skills) that students can learn to read, and read well!
Phonological awareness, a crucial precursor to future decoding, is a skill that educators can start instructing in early education settings. By providing our youngest children with ample opportunities to develop phonological awareness, which is sensitivity to the sound structure of spoken language, we are setting them up for success. Incorporating rhymes, songs, and wordplay into daily activities can significantly enhance phonological awareness skills. Additionally, preschool-aged children need to develop awareness of print concepts, including letter names and sounds. This skill will pave the way for their learning of basic phonics, another precursor to decoding and sight word recognition.
Implications for Early Literacy Instruction
The connection between emergent literacy and the Simple View of Reading lies in how emergent literacy skills contribute to the two fundamental components of reading: word recognition and language comprehension. Here’s how emergent literacy aligns with the Simple View of Reading:
Activity
As you have learned, reading requires the integration of many skills. The Simple View of Reading classifies these skills into two domains: Word Recognition and Language Comprehension. Word recognition and language comprehension include a hierarchy of easy to complex skills, some of which are used, refined, and/or mastered during early childhood. For the following activity, match the emergent literacy component skills associated with the broad reading domains they support in a child’s reading development.
Building the Precursors to Skilled Reading
In thinking of our collective goal for young children to be good decoders down the road, there are specific emergent literacy skills represented in Scarborough’s Reading Rope that we can work on with children in your care and early education settings that we know are strong predictors of future reading success. For instance, print knowledge, children’s knowledge of the alphabet, understanding how words work, and various rules about print are common instructional focuses in early childhood settings. To develop these skills, you can engage children in alphabet games, word-play, read-alouds, and discussions about books. Young children with excellent print knowledge and phonological awareness are on a pathway to becoming good readers in the future.
Looking ahead, we should also consider children’s future in terms of language comprehension. Content knowledge and vocabulary ability in young children strongly predict future comprehension abilities. By dedicating ample time in our homes and classrooms to help children build both the breadth and depth of knowledge, we are paving the way for their future success. This investment in their vocabulary skills and knowledge-building will not only enhance their comprehension abilities but also equip them with a lifelong tool for learning and understanding. We invite you to visit the later modules in this series for a deeper dive into this topic and others.
Reflection:
Consider the early childhood environments in which you work, how do you incorporate playful and purposeful activities that address both emergent literacy skills and the components of the Simple View of Reading? What might you consider doing differently after completing this lesson?
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Learning Check
You have made it to the end of this lesson. Before you move on, we have learning-check questions for you below. Please feel free to take your time and scroll back up to look over the information.
I found this very helpful in learnign how to help students become readers.