The Simple View of Reading holds that reading comprehension is a product of language comprehension and word-reading skills. Language comprehension not only includes language skills, but attention, background knowledge, and working memory.
Word-reading skills develop across three levels:
- Letter-Sound Knowledge: letter names and sounds
- Phonic Decoding: combining letter-sound knowledge and blending to sound out unfamiliar words
- Orthographic Mapping: storing written words for automatic retrieval by combining letter-sound knowledge and advanced phonological awareness skills
These skills develop concurrently, with rapid automatic naming abilities also playing a role. As mentioned, advanced phonological awareness skills are required for orthographic mapping. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds within a language, and also develops in three levels:
- Early phonological awareness: rhyming (e.g., dog, frog, log), alliteration (e.g., crazy cute cat), and breaking words into syllables (e.g., pen-cil)
- Basic phonological awareness: blending (e.g., /s/ /a/ /t/ becomes sat) and segmenting (e.g., sat becomes /s/ /a/ /t/) phonemes (units of sound)
- Advanced phonological awareness: deleting (e.g., sat becomes at), substituting (e.g., sat becomes cat), and reversing phonemes (e.g., tap becomes pat)
Four types of reading problems emerge from the Simple View of Reading:
- Dyslexia: weak word-reading, but average or better language comprehension
- Hyperlexia: average or better word-reading, but weak language comprehension
- Mixed Type: weak word-reading and language comprehension
- Compensator Type: reading comprehension is significantly below strong language comprehension (but still in the average range) due to weak word-reading
To develop word-reading skills, instruction must focus on teaching letter-sound knowledge and phonological awareness skills (to the advanced level). This process allows for the study of words to connect their sound to their spelling, resulting in automatic recognition.Â
Reference:
Kilpatrick, D. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.