Simple view of reading

[6] They define decoding as the ability to read isolated words “quickly, accurately, and silently” and dependent fundamentally on the knowledge of the correspondence between letters and their sounds.

[7] In setting out the simple view, Gough and Tunmer were responding to an ongoing dispute among psychologists, researchers and educationalists about the contribution of decoding to reading comprehension.

[12] In their 2018 review of the science of learning to read, psychologists Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle and Kate Nation write that "The logical case for the Simple View is clear and compelling: Decoding and linguistic comprehension are both necessary, and neither is sufficient alone.

"[20] The review recommended that the Simple View be used to "reconstruct" the searchlights (or cueing) model [21] that had informed the 1998 National Literacy Strategy for England, saying it should incorporate both word recognition and language comprehension as "distinct processes related one to the other.

In relation to linguistic comprehension, measures used have ranged from vocabulary to story retell, inference making, and verbal short-term memory.

To fully understand reading development, we need more precise models that detail the cognitive processes operating within the decoding and linguistic comprehension components of the Simple View.