Summary
In this episode, Hugh Catts discusses two popular reading models: the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough's Reading Rope. The Simple View of Reading highlights the importance of word recognition and language comprehension in reading comprehension. It emphasizes that if a child struggles in one area, it will affect their overall reading comprehension. Scarborough's Reading Rope provides a more detailed breakdown of the components involved in reading, including background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, strategies, and literacy knowledge. Both models help educators understand the complexity of reading and the interaction between different components.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
Summary
In this episode, Hugh Catts discusses two popular reading models: the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough's Reading Rope. The Simple View of Reading highlights the importance of word recognition and language comprehension in reading comprehension. It emphasizes that if a child struggles in one area, it will affect their overall reading comprehension. Scarborough's Reading Rope provides a more detailed breakdown of the components involved in reading, including background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, strategies, and literacy knowledge. Both models help educators understand the complexity of reading and the interaction between different components.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to. Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. The simple view of reading and Scarborough's reading rope are two models or visual representations that show how we learn to read that we've seen everywhere when people talk about the science of reading. Hugh Catts, researcher and professor at Florida State University, will dive into these models and where they came from, how they're meant to be interpreted for reading, instruction and more. Hi teacher friends, I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.
Melissa:We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.
Melissa:Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Lori:Hi teacher friends, Welcome back. This is our second episode in a series where Hugh Catts is here to help us break down some popular reading models or visual representations that many of us are familiar with. In the first episode in the series 177, we talked about the five pillars from the National Reading Panel.
Melissa:And in this episode we'll focus on two very popular models or visual representations the simple view of reading and Scarborough's reading rope.
Lori:All right, so let's start with the simple view of reading. Hugh, I know our listeners are familiar with this one, but can you give us a break down, a simple break down, before we dive into talking about it even more?
Hugh Catts:Yeah, Let me start a little bit about the history of this model. I found out about the model really early on and really liked it, so I was an early adopter of the simple view of reading. It was proposed back in the late 80s actually mid-80s, 1986 by Phil Goff and his doctoral student at the time, Bill Tonmer, and then a couple years later, Wes Hoover, which was another doctoral student at the time, wrote a paper and they were working within the height of whole language era and they were particularly interested in word reading and the importance of word reading instruction in teaching kids to read. So they proposed a model of reading comprehension which was that reading comprehension was a product of decoding, which they met by that word recognition more generally, and linguistic comprehension or language comprehension or what later on has been referred to as listing comprehension. And it was the product rather than the addition, because if you didn't have an ability in one area, it led to no ability in reading comprehension. So if you couldn't read words at all, you didn't have comprehension and it served the purpose of highlighting the importance of word recognition. That word recognition was used to convert print into language and then the individual would use their language processing that overlaps with what they do in listing comprehension to understand the text.
Hugh Catts:And I was drawn to it because I came out of the field of communication disorders and had been talking about the importance of language in reading comprehension and so in the early 90s I actually went and did a sabbatical in New Zealand where Bill Tunmer had taken a job there and we spent some time talking about language and its role in reading, comprehension and and doing. He was quite the outdoorsman. So we did, we did a bit of hiking they call it tramping out there.
Lori:We actually climbed the volcano And- Were you talking about reading the whole time?
Hugh Catts:No, we were. We were basically trying to work our way up and down and and and missed, did a mistiming and ended up coming down the last portion of the volcano in the dark, which was kind of scary, but Anyway, well, we made it down, but Thank goodness, yeah, I came back to the to the States and did a number of studies in using the simple view and looking at the contributions of word reading and and language comprehension to reading comprehension. And what we found was what you might expect that in the early grades most of the variability and how well kids understood what they read was dependent upon how well they recognized words. But over the early grade second, third grade what we started to see was language comprehension ability started to to explain unique variants in in reading, that individual differences in kids language comprehension abilities accounted for more of the variance in in in reading comprehension. We also did some studies looking at groups of readers who had problems in one area and not the air, not both or both areas. So we would find a group of children who had problems in word reading but not language comprehension and we would refer to those kids as having dyslexia Right. So that's kind of the.
Hugh Catts:The traditional notion of of dyslexia is specific problems in in word reading. Toward the other group of kids that have problems in in language comprehension but not in word reading, we're referred to as poor comprehenders or children with specific comprehension deficit and we and others have looked at what might underlie those difficulties and, coming from a language background, we focused on their, their language ability and looked at their vocabulary, grammar, discourse, and found that indeed they had problems in those areas. One thing we missed at the time was that their problem in language was rather moderate compared to their difficulties in reading. Comprehension, right, and I'll talk about it a minute. There's more involved in comprehension than language comprehension, if you will. I'll come back to that in a minute. Right, and? And then there were, there were dozens of not more than a hundred studies in the in the 10 years, you know, in the early part of 2000s, looking at the simple, simple view, right, and so it's got a long tradition within research and and helping us better understand reading.
Lori:Is there anything that you think our listeners should be aware of with this model? I mean, it's very, very simple. So that's one thing you know and I don't. I think that's the intent of it, right. I mean that's to to really simplify it and break it down to like the most simple components. I mean, I appreciate it. I also think it's not the be all, end all, but I don't think it was meant to be.
Hugh Catts:It often get asked as a simple view to simple. Well, actually it's not for its purpose, it's original purpose. So it's original purpose, as I said before, was to highlight the importance of word reading and that's what golf and tonma and West Hoover had in mind. But what happened? The researchers looked at individual aspects of word reading and of language comprehension in the research that was done and in the models that came out of that. But what happened?
Hugh Catts:When it started to move its way into reading instruction, people began to think about those as two different aspects of reading and there should be instruction for word reading and instruction for language comprehension. And the way it's seen in models, that's a bit problematic because the visual representations have decoding or word recognition, whatever you want, and language comprehension in the same size fonts, they're in the same size boxes or circles or whatever they might be. And again, this is a case of a visual image leading us to some false expectations or realizations, in this case that those two, word reading and language comprehension, are somewhat similar in terms of their complexity and and valubility. And again, even though we know that's not the case, the idea is that we can work on word recognition. Now let's go work on language comprehension, and both of those are complex, but it it certainly downplays the complexity of language comprehension. The other problem with with the model a potential problem with the model is that the name language comprehension is misleading, because it leads us to believe that it is language comprehension or language understanding.
Hugh Catts:And, as I said, the study that we did earlier showed that, yes, these kids had language problems, but they didn't have nearer the degree of language difficulty that they had with their reading comprehension.
Hugh Catts:It also led to people doing studies in which they tried to improve language abilities vocabulary, grammar, text level comprehension and to expect that you'd have rather immediate effects on reading comprehension. And that's what happened in a number of the studies that were part of the Reading for Understanding initiative. I was part of one group there, but there were there were five different groups, and a number of the groups trained language abilities and then looked to see the impact on standardized test of reading comprehension and found very limited impact on standardized tests of reading comprehension, in part because it was a mismatch. The language that was taught wasn't always overlapped with what was on the particular text, but there's lots more to comprehension than one's ability to understand language. There's the knowledge that that's involved in understanding the particular topic that one is is reading about, and that was missing in many of the early discussions of language comprehension the role of knowledge in creating an understanding about what one reads.
Melissa:So I feel like this might be a good time to move on to Scarborough's reading rope, because you know they they have very similar categories in the word recognition and the language comprehension and leading to a reading comprehension, but it's a little more detailed. So do you want to talk a bit about how it came to be?
Hugh Catts:Yeah, sure. So people did attempt to divide these two areas, if you will, of reading up into so-called components or variables that are involved in either word reading or language comprehension. And Hollis was one of the people that did that early on. I think she did it a book chapter in 2001. And that's Hollis Scarborough, hollis Scarborough, yes, hollis Scarborough in 2001. And I recognize that.
Hugh Catts:I read that paper right away, thought, oh, this is a really useful model to teach kids about, or teach teachers about, what's involved in reading and to understand the complexity and the interaction of different components that were missing in some of the other models. And, as the story goes, hollis was trying to explain the different components of word reading and language comprehension to teachers and educators, and she was using pipe cleaners. So you know, you date this. I mean, we haven't seen pipe cleaners in a while but the idea was that you could show how these different components were interrelated by weaving together the pipe cleaners. But, as the story goes, it eventually turned into strands of the rope and we had strands of rope that were involved in language comprehension and strands of rope that were involved in word recognition, and then those two were wrapped together to end up with the reading rope, which is a combination of these and you know right off, it does a nice job of showing how the different things we talk about as components of reading are actually interactive in their in their nature and in their in their development. So what Hollis did was divide language comprehension down into a number of different areas, starting with background knowledge. So she recognized right away that that the key to understanding what one reads is having some knowledge about that particular topic. Right, that background knowledge is an essential end in building a coherent understanding of whatever it might be. And then the next strand was vocabulary, which is related to background knowledge. But the difference between vocabulary and knowledge is that vocabulary refers to the particular entity that we're defining and using and whatever, and knowledge is a combination of related words, there are related ideas into a, into a more coherent understanding of a particular topic area.
Hugh Catts:She also talked about language structures which she met, their grammar and how grammar was important in understanding language, and we know that the grammar of written texts and classroom lectures is a lot more complex than the grammar that that we might use in everyday conversation. It also goes to discourse level aspects of language, how we join sentences together, or parts of texts together, so how we use. However, nevertheless, even though those words are used to draw to connect different ideas within a text and that's what she was referring to in language structures she also included verbal reasoning in there that we can have a good deal of knowledge about a particular topic, but to understand it, we have to think about it, right? If we're going to remember what we read, we have to engage in thought processes about that particular topic, and that's where strategies come in. Reading strategies are ways to think about what we're reading, and I'll talk a little bit minute about it's also the ways we might think about Listing as well, right, we could use strategies there to think about what, what teachers are talking about, so forth.
Hugh Catts:And then, lastly, the last aspect of that was literacy knowledge, and that refers to our print awareness, also, genre and how books work. You know books have a particular structure so that a book would narratives, have a story grammar to them, to where other texts. An opinion text has a certain way that it's laid out, a descriptive text has a way that it's laid out, and so forth. So we can quickly see the complexity of language comprehension, right, I mean, it's more than this box that's labeled with language, that that is a very complex cognitive activity to understand what you read, even when you've already turned it into language through the word recognition module, if you will, and very quickly. There, what she talked about was decoding ability, that was, the ability to understand how graphemes correspond to phonemes and being able to decode a word, sight, word reading, phonological awareness. And that blended together and I think she would put fluency up in the blending together of comprehension and language, comprehension and word reading.
Melissa:Quick question for you. When you mentioned the students who were struggling with language comprehension, their language comprehension was not as bad as the reading comprehension. They struggled more with the reading comprehension. Is it because of these things that you just talked about?
Hugh Catts:Like it's more complex than I wouldn't say the language comprehension, because what we thought was language comprehension meant language understanding, vocabulary, grammar, like some aspects of discourse. So we taught, we texted those very specifically. We didn't test, for example, listening comprehension. So you read a text and kids would we measure their ability to understand that text? If you will, those kids would probably have trouble with that as well, because that also involves knowledge about a topic, the ability to understand how the texts that you're reading goes together, and so forth. So it's more to do with measuring the knowledge that's in those passages, the verbal reasoning that one engages in in using language to understand text. So that was what was missing in our study. The kids did have language problems, but they were rather moderate compared to much more severe reading difficulties.
Melissa:Well, is there anything? I mean, the rope sounds great, but he went into so much more detail.
Hugh Catts:Yeah, I like it as a visual representation for highlighting the aspects that are involved in reading, but again recognizing that these things are best taught in a way that they've seen as interacting, so that language comprehension is taught within a particular purpose and a particular topic for an extended period of time.
Hugh Catts:And that's what the new content rich literacy programs do is. They teach kids about how to form coherent understandings of text that build on each other over time. And, frankly, we could use some of these same principles within listing comprehension teaching kids how to best extract and understand information from teacher discussions that take place in classrooms how do you take notes? How do you check your comprehension? Are you monitoring your comprehension? What do you do if you don't understand, so forth. And I always thought it was interesting that we wouldn't think about this with listening comprehension, but with reading comprehension. That's all we thought about to a certain extent was the strategies that we might use to where both share the same principles or the same purpose, let's say, of understanding the text or, in the case of literature, appreciating the story or whatever it might be.
Melissa:Was there anything about the word recognition side of the reading rope that you wanted to point out?
Hugh Catts:No, I mean I think I covered that in others' components that I've talked about or other models that I've talked about, but I could say again here that we would think about that in an interactive fashion that we're not going to teach.
Hugh Catts:But I would point out that there's this idea that we'd have to teach phonological awareness up to some level of expertise before we can teach about the alphabetical principle. And that's not the case, because what we're doing with the phonological awareness is having kids appreciate the sound structure of language to the level at which they can learn how the alphabetic principle works, that the letters of the alphabet correspond to the sounds within the language. Much of what you and I know about phonological awareness are actually the result of reading, not what we knew prior to reading. Reading actually has a huge impact on our thinking about print. We see print as segmental and print is not segmental. I'm sorry, speech is not segmental as I'm speaking to you now. It's just one big long stream of auditory energy. But having learned how to spell and read, we think of it as being broken up into individual segments.
Lori:And it's not, and it's not. Well, thank you so much. This is so helpful and so interesting to go really deep into each model, each representation, so thank you for being here to do that, yeah thanks, thanks for giving me the opportunity.
Hugh Catts:Nice talking with you guys.
Melissa:Yes, and in our next episode, hughes back one more time to share with us a model focused on comprehension. So we can't wait to keep learning with you. To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
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Melissa:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.
Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us. Thank you.