The Simple View of Reading

Many educators do not understand the importance of the simple view of reading.

The simple view of reading is a formula that demonstrates the widely accepted view that reading is divided into two basic components - word recognition and language comprehension.

Understanding the formula will help educators have a proper understanding of the weaknesses and strengths of the students and alter study plans accordingly.

The simple view formula can support studies that show the student’s reading comprehension score can be predicted from their decoding skills and language comprehension skills. 

Here are some of the ways teachers can take advantage of Simple Views of Reading and improve the reading potential of the students:

1. The simple view reading formula provides a clear comprehension of the reading skills of the students that depend on the decoding and language comprehension abilities.

• Students need to learn to decode as early as possible. Being a decoding expert can give them a better grasp of the reader’s comprehensive abilities.
• Students need to have a strong knowledge of content in many domains at all the grade levels to develop an efficient set of language comprehensive abilities. 

2. Intervention for struggling readers is effective when it addresses specific weaknesses of the students and caters to the problems with better learning methods.

• Intervention instructions focus on the development of content knowledge that can benefit the comprehensive skills of the reader.
• Struggling readers of all ages can have weak decoding skills, explicit instructions will be provided to improve their reading comprehension skills by catering to the language comprehension.

3. Decoding and language comprehension skills are assessed separately to achieve the best results for reading comprehension.

• Scores from the RC assessment are not always enough data to identify the areas of weakness, so teachers can separately track the decoding and language comprehension skills to be certain.
• Assessment for students of all ages must have sufficient information to identify the skills separately. 

4. The Simple View of Reading is a mathematical formula that uses three variables to determine the reading comprehension abilities of a person. 

5. The Simple View of reading is supported by scientific research and studies.

Importance of the Assessment

RC scores are one of the best ways to assess the skills of any person.

Although only RC scores to assign the students to an intervention can be a bit of a stretch, it provides enough information to provide an improved learning structure for the students.

It has been seen that with older age, RC scores can drop.

Although the reason for less RC score in older age is considered to be the difficulty in language comprehension, it is more of the weakness decoding that can be a problem in older students. 

Both younger and older students with low RC scores need extra assessment of Decoding and LC scores for a better-customized learning pattern.

Informal assessments are readily available and can be used for a better learning experience.

Moreover, it is also easier to give decoding assessments and estimate the LC scores, than the other way around.