Frank Smith was born in England in 1928 and lived on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
[2] Before taking the position at the Ontario Institute, Smith briefly worked at the Southwest Regional Laboratory in Los Alamitos, California.
[20] Working from diverse perspectives, Frank Smith and Kenneth S. Goodman developed the theory of a unified single reading process that comprises an interaction between reader, text and language.
[24] In 1975 he participated in a television documentary filmed by Stephen Rose for the BBC Horizon TV series while based at the Toronto Institute for Studies in Education.
The whole-language theory explained reading as a "language experience," where the reader interacts with the text/content and this in turn facilitates the link – "knowledge" – between the text and meaning.