Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E1: The (not so) Simple View of Reading, with Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 1

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Wesley Hoover, a psycholinguist at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss the Simple View of Reading and how it can serve as the basis for our understanding of comprehension. Wesley digs into all the complexities of this model—which is only simple at a high level—including the meaning of language comprehension vs. reading comprehension, the impact of word recognition, and using the simple view to identify struggling students. He’ll even address the limitations of the simple view of reading, untangle common misconceptions, and give you tools for assessing the value of any model for reading that you might encounter.

Show notes: 

Quotes:

"Language comprehension is unbounded… the knowledge of the world and being able to express the knowledge of the world in language—that's always a key difficulty you work on for your entire life.” —Wesley Hoover, Ph.D. 

“If you're a teacher thinking about language comprehension, whatever time you devote to helping people understand language, if you can be effective in doing that, you'll never waste a kid's time.” —Wesley Hoover, Ph.D. 

"To be a reader, you have to be good at two things: word recognition and language comprehension. Both of them are necessary components of reading, but neither one of them is sufficient on its own.”—Wesley Hoover, Ph.D. 

Episode timestamps*
03:00 Introduction: Wesley Hoover and the simple view of reading
06:00 What is the simple view of reading?
08:00 What is language comprehension?
10:00 What is word recognition?
11:00 Defining reading comprehension
12:00 Dr. Gough’s big A-Ha! Moment
15:00 Reading competency
16:00 Misconceptions of the simple view of reading
21:00 Changing the size of the boxes
23:00 Extension of the simple view
26:00 Using the simple view to identify kids that are struggling
29:00 What the simple view does or does not address
33:00 Navigating models of reading comprehension
35:00 Is the simple view outdated?
38:00 Why is comprehension worth exploring?
41:00 Final advice
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

[00:00:00] Wesley Hoover: The only way you get to strong reading comprehension is through strong word recognition and strong language comprehension.

[00:00:11] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Season 10 of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. By now you've probably heard that this season is going to be all about comprehension. We've been exploring the foundations of comprehension on recent episodes, but now we're going deep.

[00:00:30] Susan Lambert: On upcoming episodes, we'll explore the cognitive processes underlying comprehension. We're going to have entire episodes devoted to different factors that contribute to comprehension. We're going to really unpack the cutting edge research on comprehension assessment. And along the way, we'd love to tackle your comprehension-related questions too. So you can always submit your questions for me and our expert guests at [00:01:00] amplify.com/sormailbag. For this kickoff episode to our season on comprehension, I wanted to specifically explore the Simple View of Reading.

[00:01:11] Susan Lambert: I want to start with a Simple View of Reading because it is, it's an elegant model to talk about the capacities that a proficient reader or somebody that has great reading comprehension needs to have. We want to make sure when we're talking about comprehension, that we have this reminder that it's impacted by word recognition as well as by language comprehension.

[00:01:32] Susan Lambert: You can't have reading comprehension without either one of those, but they're both pretty complex, and so I think it's important to start the season looking at a model we talk about all the time to help us really understand the complexities of reading comprehension. So now it's time to introduce our first guest of Season 10, Dr. Wesley a Hoover. Dr. Hoover earned his Ph.D. in human experimental [00:02:00] psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. He worked at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory for 35 years in the areas of early reading, bilingual reading, and language acquisition. And I'm so thrilled to now bring him onto the show.

[00:02:18] Susan Lambert: Dr. Wesley Hoover, it is such an honor to have you on this episode of the podcast. Welcome. 

[00:02:24] Wesley Hoover: Thank you so much. It's great to be here. 

[00:02:26] Susan Lambert: It's amazing the Science of Reading: The Podcast, and I talk about the Simple View of Reading all the time, we finally have an expert on the show to tell us a little bit about the Simple View.

[00:02:37] Susan Lambert: Before we get there, though, I really would like to know about your path to the Simple View. How did you make it to the Simple View of Reading? 

[00:02:46] Wesley Hoover: So, it's a long path. I was an undergraduate student at Trinity University in San Antonio. I originally was a mathematics major, but stopped that and switched to psychology. While doing my psychology courses, I took a philosophy of language course, actually took two of them, and there I was introduced to Noam Chomsky and read a couple of his books.

[00:03:08] Wesley Hoover: Just got very excited about the structure of language and what it meant for cognition. That is, what kinds of things would you have to have in your head in order to learn the complexities of a language, and to do so only by being exposed to it. So those became very important ideas to me, and I talked to my philosophy of language professor and he said, "Well, if you're interested in psycholinguistics, the best place in the country, one of the two, is University of Texas." The other one was University of Pittsburgh. So I drove up to Austin, about 60 miles away, talked to Phil Goff, who was the head of the department at that time, told him I was very interested in psychology of language. And we talked for a while and I applied, I got in, started school there.

[00:03:52] Wesley Hoover: And Phil at that time, in the sixties, early sixties, this was the early seventies, in the early sixties, he was working mostly on word recognition. And then in the seventies, he switched to whole models of reading, from a cognitive perspective, what does it take in order to be able to learn to read?

[00:04:10] Wesley Hoover: And so I started studying with him at that point. And that's how I got to the Simple View. Once he had the insight about the Simple View, then I had some data that I had collected from another study I had been doing at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL), and from that, we were able to actually do the first empirical investigation of the Simple View of Reading.

[00:04:34] Susan Lambert: That is such a great story. You know, you just don't wake up one day and say, "Hmm, I'm going to go into linguistics." Right? So it was sort of a path into that. That's really cool. 

[00:04:45] Wesley Hoover: Exactly. 

[00:04:46] Susan Lambert: And for our listeners that aren't aware, Phil Goff was one of the originators of the simple View of Reading model.

[00:04:53] Wesley Hoover: Yeah. He really is the originator. I mean he's the one that had the insight, the aha moment. And I can talk a little bit about that to go on. 

[00:05:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Oh, that would be great. I know the Simple View, like I said, I use it as a foundational model all the time. We use it a lot here at the podcast. I think when I started to talk about the Simple View maybe five years ago in front of audiences, many people didn't understand it, didn't even know, weren't even aware that it's been around for such a long time. I think we're getting more awareness in the Science of Reading movement about the Simple View of Reading, but that also means we have some misconceptions and misunderstandings about what it is.

[00:05:34] Susan Lambert: So I would love if you could just give us an overview of the Simple View. 

[00:05:38] Wesley Hoover: Sure. So, the Simple View of Reading, is really about what constitutes reading comprehension. And the idea is that to be a reader you have to be good at two things, word recognition and language comprehension. And both of them are necessary components of reading, but neither one of them is sufficient on its own, which means you have to have both and one can't compensate for the other. So no matter how good you are at linguistic comprehension, language comprehension, if you don't have any skill in word recognition for a given language, you won't be able to read it.

[00:06:13] Wesley Hoover: And vice versa. If you have great skill and word recognition but don't know the language, you won't be able to read it. So that's the simple view, that reading comprehension is a product of language comprehension and word recognition. And it's actually been around, I mean the early beginnings of experimental psychology back in the 1880s with McKeen Cattell.

[00:06:37] Wesley Hoover: He did studies of word recognition at the time, and reading has always been a big part of experimental psychology. And the idea that you had to have both word recognition and language comprehension, or decoding, and being able to understand a language, those were central ideas for over a hundred years.

[00:06:55] Wesley Hoover: So it's been around a long time. But putting them together as the product, and thinking about them on a scale from zero to one—no skill to perfect skill—that was the insight that Phil Goff had. And when you put them together in that way and conceive them as a product, then you get this whole insight into what reading comprehension is that goes way beyond just two factors. 

[00:07:21] Susan Lambert: Hmm. All right, well before we go way beyond what, and follow that path down, can you do a good overview of each of those elements? Like what is language comprehension? What is word recognition? And what is reading comprehension, as sort of defined by this model?

[00:07:38] Wesley Hoover: Sure. So, language comprehension is the ability to take from linguistic discourse, language; the ability to derive meaning from language, and it's both literal and inferred meaning. So it's the literal meaning that you get from just understanding the language, but it's also the inferred meaning that's allowed by the language because of your knowledge of the world.

[00:08:03] Wesley Hoover: So you have to be good at language comprehension. You have to have both good language skills, good formal structures, Know the syntax, know the phenology, know the semantics. But you also have to know about the world, because language uses knowledge of the world to allow you to make inferences about given situations.

[00:08:24] Wesley Hoover: So for instance, if you hear the sentence, The cloth ripped, but she was saved by the haystack. You understand that language, just from the point of view of understanding the syntax, but you understand so much more if you know that that was about a parachute collapsing and somebody was doing a parachute jump over a farm.

[00:08:46] Wesley Hoover: So now I can understand more of what that sentence means. So having knowledge of the world mixes with the ability to understand the language to give you the meaning that you can infer from that language. 

[00:09:01] Susan Lambert: All right. That's language comprehension. What do we mean by word recognition? 

[00:09:05] Wesley Hoover: So word recognition, just the simple aspect of it, is just get the words off the page. But what that means is you have to be able to recognize print, and you have to be able to do it quickly and accurately. If you can't do it quickly, then by the time you actually are able to figure out what a given word is, you've probably forgotten the previous words in the sentence you're reading. And so then you can't understand the language.

[00:09:34] Wesley Hoover: You can't use your language skills because you don't remember what were the words that came before. And if you're not accurate, then you'll mistake words for other words and get different meanings. So, an example I like to use for that is, John was not on the boat versus John was hot on the boat.

[00:09:53] Wesley Hoover: Just that little extension of the "h" versus the "n." If you miss that, you're going to get a totally different understanding of what that sentence is. 

[00:10:03] Susan Lambert: That's a great example. So you put those two things together and you have reading comprehension. How would you define reading comprehension? 

[00:10:10] Wesley Hoover: So reading comprehension—I always like to say this—is the same thing as language comprehension. It's just that it's done with respect to print rather than phonology, rather than listening. And so it requires the same set of skills. And reading is just being able to derive meaning from printed language as opposed to derive meaning from orally presented language.

[00:10:34] Wesley Hoover: There are clearly differences between the kind of language that appears in print: formal text, sentence structures are more complicated, vocabulary is more complicated. But that doesn't invalidate the Simple View because the Simple View only says that your ability to understand the language, whether it's conversational language or formal language, is the key component, is one of the two key components in reading comprehension. So it's not that conversational language drives reading comprehension, it's that language comprehension drives reading comprehension. And so you have to distinguish the kind of language from the medium in which that language appears. 

[00:11:20] Susan Lambert: Hmm, that makes sense.

[00:11:22] Susan Lambert: So you said that, Dr. Goff had a big aha when he was working on this model. What was that big aha that he had? 

[00:11:29] Wesley Hoover: So, if you go back and look kind of at the literature for the 20 years or so before the Simple View paper came out in '86, the one that he wrote with Bill Tunmer, there were many hints that he was coming to this idea.

[00:11:43] Wesley Hoover: And in a paper in 1980, for instance, he talks about a view of reading that's simple. And that it's reading is really composed of two factors: language comprehension and decoding. So that's getting close to the Simple View. It's not quite there. About the same time, Charles Perfetti at Pittsburgh actually expressed an equation saying that reading comprehension equals decoding plus language comprehension, plus x, and the x is very small relative to the other two factors. So again, very close to the Simple View, but not quite there. Phil, I think actually had just one day, the aha moment, that the way to capture this idea of both of those capacities being necessary but not sufficient, was to think about them on a scale from no skill to perfection. And then think about combining them multiplicatively. And once you do that, then if you have no skill in one factor, it doesn't matter what the level of skill is from nil to perfection and the other factor, reading is still going to be zero.

[00:12:57] Wesley Hoover: So that was the aha, the insight that you could capture reading comprehension not as the sum, but as the product of language comprehension and word recognition. Just those two factors. Neither sufficient, but both necessary. 

[00:13:13] Susan Lambert: Thank you for that. That's really interesting. And for listeners, if you wonder why I asked that question, it's just this idea of science evolving and developing on other, you know, other researchers, and so science evolving over time. And it's just a good reminder that these ideas just don't come out of the blue.

[00:13:29] Wesley Hoover: Yeah, I'd actually mention another one that happened in the '70s with Richard Beneski and Bob Calfee who talked about reading competency, and their idea was that reading competency consisted of basic reading skills, which for them essentially was decoding.

[00:13:45] Wesley Hoover: And what they called the written to oral ratio, how well you understood written language relative to how well you understood orally presented language. Well, that is the Simple View. Decoding equals the ratio of written language skill to oral language skill, and they just didn't put it together as that.

[00:14:10] Wesley Hoover: And I think, the reason Phil got the insight was again, this idea of talking about skill, going from no skill to perfection. So it's an abstraction. We don't have tests that allow us to do that, but thinking about language and word recognition as running from having no skill to being able to have perfect skill, meaning in word recognition I can recognize every word that I'm presented with and I can do it quickly and accurately. And language comprehension, meaning I can understand every piece of language I'm presented with. We know you can't do that because, again, knowledge of the world is necessary for understanding language. And there isn't anybody in the world who understands everything.

[00:14:53] Susan Lambert: No, for sure. Well, some people think they do, but yes. What are misconceptions then about the Simple View of Reading? 

[00:15:02] Wesley Hoover: So there were misconceptions that came out right away from the beginning. And there are several that persist, and it's not clear to me why they persist, but there are things like, the Simple View can't be right because reading is complex, we know that language comprehension is complex, how are we able to understand how people are able to understand language? That's got to be a complex cognitive process that's used. But the Simple View doesn't say that reading is not complex, it just says the complexity is housed in two factors: word recognition and language comprehension. And both of those are complex.

[00:15:40] Wesley Hoover: So it's not that the Simple View is stating that reading is not complex, it's just saying that that complexity is in two factors. 

[00:15:48] Susan Lambert: Hmm. I love how you said that. 

[00:15:50] Wesley Hoover: So that's one. 

[00:15:51] Susan Lambert: Okay. 

[00:15:51] Wesley Hoover: Another one is this idea that oral language drives reading comprehension, and that's not what the Simple View says.

[00:16:01] Wesley Hoover: Indeed, as I just talked about a few minutes ago, you have to separate language from the medium in which it occurs. So the Simple View only says, regardless of whether the language is conversational language or formal academic language, your ability to read it is determined in part by your ability to understand it if it's read to you.

[00:16:22] Wesley Hoover: So that makes clear that the language is what's important and not the medium in which it occurs. 

[00:16:30] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Okay. So that's number two. You got any other ones? 

[00:16:34] Wesley Hoover: Yeah, I do. One that persists is, actually, someone recently said that one of the things, the Simple View gets right— and they were thinking that the Simple View gets lots of things that were wrong— is that it does get correct that in learning to read one learns to recognize the words that they already know. So the idea is that you have language skill, and when you learn to read, all you have to do is add the word recognition part to it to be a reader. Well, that may be true for many people, but it's not true for everybody. For sure, there are lots of people who are being taught to read in a language they don't yet understand, and the Simple View has nothing to say about that. It just says, regardless of where you are in word recognition and language comprehension skill, the product of those two things will determine how well you can read at that moment in time.

[00:17:32] Wesley Hoover: So the Simple View, you have to remember, is a concurrent view of reading. It's not a developmental model. It's about if you measure word recognition, language comprehension, and reading comprehension at the same time, and you do it in parallel fashion, then what you'll find out is that reading comprehension can be decomposed into the product of language comprehension and word recognition.

[00:17:56] Wesley Hoover: So it doesn't say what comes first or how strong you are when you're first encounter learning to read. So that's one of the big misunderstandings. 

[00:18:06] Susan Lambert: Hmm, that's a good one. 

[00:18:07] Wesley Hoover: Yeah. Others similar to one, just discussed is that the contributions of word recognition and language comprehension are not constant over time.

[00:18:16] Wesley Hoover: And again, the Simple View doesn't say anything about the constancy. It just says, again, concurrently, whatever the skill levels are, knowing those two skill levels in the sub components will predict what your reading comprehension skills are. So, in normal, whatever that is, progressions in learning to read, kids that come to school with very strong language comprehension skills learn to recognize words. What you'll find out as you track them over time is that initially their language comprehension skills are strong, but their word recognition skills are weak. And so what drives their ability to read at that point is word recognition, because they don't have very much.

[00:19:00] Wesley Hoover: But when they get older and they master word recognition, and they can essentially read all of the. 50- 75,000 words they typically know, then what drives their reading comprehension is language comprehension. And that's usually driven by knowledge of the world again. I mean, once you get to be an older student, you're going to learn more complex syntax, but not at the rate you did when you were first learning language.

[00:19:29] Wesley Hoover: So what's going to drive a reading comprehension then is language comprehension, which is mostly going to be driven by knowledge of the world. 

[00:19:38] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Those are great ones. I think I had an aha over that one that you were just talking about that, you know, you always see the Simple View of Reading as the same size boxes, right? Language comprehension, word recognition, and I can't remember what article I read, but it occurred to me that maybe if you change the size of the boxes, you know, for the contribution that each of those makes, maybe that's a little easier to understand.

[00:20:02] Susan Lambert: The other thing that was really interesting about what you said was, the complexity lies within each of those boxes. So, you know, I remember folks talking about the Simple View of Reading, "No, we're not trying to say that teaching a kid how to read is simple or developing strong reading comprehension is simple." But I loved that explanation of how you say that complexities sit sort of inside those two boxes. And I'm going to guess that the complexities are different levels of complexities within both of those boxes. Is that right? 

[00:20:35] Wesley Hoover: Yes, but before I go back, let me go back to your first comment.

[00:20:38] Susan Lambert: Oh, oh, please. Yeah.

[00:20:39] Wesley Hoover: About the two boxes. So one of the most popular descriptions of the Simple View is a line with two circles on top of it, word recognition and language comprehension. And they're both the same size. And, Hugh Catts, about seven or eight years ago, made the comment that that was a misleading description because the influence of word recognition and language comprehension, the importance of those two factors in determining reading comprehension, changes over time.

[00:21:10] Wesley Hoover: Word recognition early on, language comprehension later on. So I think those two circles over a line are still adequate descriptions of the Simple View, if you think of it this way. And that is that the two factors are always, always essential. That regardless of your skill in either one of them, if you take it away, you're not going to have any reading comprehension.

[00:21:38] Wesley Hoover: So I think of that diagram, not as representing the relative contributions, but the essential nature of word recognition and language comprehension always the essential nature to reading comprehension. 

[00:21:52] Susan Lambert: Oh, I love that. That is a great reminder. And a great reminder for the purpose of the model, so, that's awesome. 

[00:21:58] Wesley Hoover: So now let me go to the complexity question. 

[00:22:00] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:22:00] Wesley Hoover: So, there are, several what are called extensions of the Simple View. And extensions can be a tricky term, but there are some models like, a model that Bill Tunmer and I proposed called the Cognitive Foundations Framework, which actually tries to lay out the factors and their relationships that underlie language comprehension and word recognition. The Reading Rope, for instance, tries to do the same sort of thing by saying there are these two strands of language comprehension and word recognition, and they consist of a number of factors within each one. And as you learn to read, those factors get intertwined with each other, and the braids get stronger, and finally you get to where there's a single rope that integrates all those factors with each other, and you have reading comprehension.

[00:22:52] Wesley Hoover: Well, I have some disagreements with that view because I don't see all of those factors as being equally interrelated. And so in the Cognitive Foundations, we think about: what are the factors underneath, for instance, word recognition, that are required and what order are they needed in order to master word recognition?

[00:23:16] Wesley Hoover: So, you have alphabetic coding skills at the top thing under word recognition because being able to recognize what are the links between orthography and phonology through alphabetic coding, is a critical skill. But to have that skill, you have to be able to have the alphabetic principle, that is, you have to know that when you're learning to read, the game is to try and associate the letters that you're seeing in print with the phone names that they're trying to represent orally.

[00:23:47] Wesley Hoover: So you have the alphabetic, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, and under that you have phonemic awareness and letter knowledge. So that kind of gives you this complexity as not a complexity of how reading is done, again, these are capacities, so you have to know how to recognize letters.

[00:24:05] Wesley Hoover: You have to be able to have the capacity to recognize all the letters, you have to be able to segment the phone names, you have to have the awareness to put those two things together, you have to know how print works in English—left to right, top to bottom, spaces represent breaks in between words.

[00:24:25] Wesley Hoover: And when you have that, then you can get to alphabetic coding. And when you get to alphabetic coding, you can get to automaticity. So, that shows you the complexity again, not in the way reading is accomplished, but in what you have to know in order to accomplish it. 

[00:24:42] Susan Lambert: Got it. And I would imagine in that hierarchy there, if anything breaks down on the lower part of that, you've got a problem. 

[00:24:49] Wesley Hoover: Yeah. And so that's, one of the ways I think the Simple View can really be used is by teachers thinking about, "When I find kids that are struggling, where are they struggling?" And the first question ought to be, is it language comprehension, is it word recognition, is it both? And if it's word recognition, then you can start to work your way down. Do they have alphabetic coding skills? Do they have the alphabetic principle? Do they know how to recognize letters? Can they do phonemic awareness? Do they know how print works? So you can start to get a profile of where kids have strengths and weaknesses, and then use that to target instruction.

[00:25:29] Wesley Hoover: And on the language side, it's just as complicated to know a language. You have to know its phenology, it's syntax, it's semantics. The semantics both at the word level or morpheme, as well as at the sentence level and the interconnections between sentences. But that just gives you the formal structure of language.

[00:25:48] Wesley Hoover: You also have to have, as we talked about earlier, knowledge of the world. So putting knowledge of the world together with linguistic knowledge gives you language comprehension. And so again, if you have kids that are struggling in reading and you find out that their language comprehension is not good, then you want to assess whether their phonology is troubled. And for teachers, that's a hard thing to do. And you're probably best to go to a speech pathologist to see just whether a kid is having trouble recognizing the sounds in the language. But again. It gives you a way to look at where is the difficulty that kids are facing within language comprehension.

[00:26:27] Susan Lambert: Wow. The message there is it truly is complex, isn't it? 

[00:26:30] Wesley Hoover: Yeah. Very complicated. So it's a Simple View, but it's only a simple view at the highest level. 

[00:26:39] Susan Lambert: I think in one of the articles you wrote, it's all about the grain size, right? It's a very large grain size that we're talking about. 

[00:26:45] Wesley Hoover: Right. Right. So again, word recognition and language comprehension, those are two big ideas. And each one of them is complex. But it's very helpful to think about when you have a kid that's struggling. The first question: Is it in word recognition? Is it in language comprehension? Is it in both? That's where the power of the Simple View is. 

[00:27:06] Susan Lambert: Mm. That was so nicely said. I really appreciate that. This complexity, it's good news for our listeners because we're spending a whole season trying to unpack all these things about reading comprehension. So we're super happy that you can help us understand these constructs. 

[00:27:20] Wesley Hoover: Great. 

[00:27:21] Susan Lambert: So I want to give you another opportunity to talk about anything that the Simple View does or doesn't address.

[00:27:28] Wesley Hoover: So, I like to talk about this in terms of contrasts. 

[00:27:31] Susan Lambert: Okay. 

[00:27:31] Wesley Hoover: And so the Simple View, it's a theory of reading first and foremost. And why that's important is because it allows you to draw predictions. And predictions are the critical piece in any science. I have a theory, I draw predictions from it. If they're clear and testable, I can go out and test them. If they're falsified, I know my theory is wrong, and I know where it's wrong. If they're not falsified, well, I have some added hope that my theory might be correct. It's not proven, but at least it's not falsified.

[00:28:06] Wesley Hoover: And so the Simple View, one of its strengths is that it is a theory of what constitutes reading comprehension. Whereas other theories, other descriptions of reading are either just descriptions of what reading is, or they're heuristics— ways to kind of keep in mind what's important, or they're metaphors— like the Reading Rope is really a metaphor. How Scarborough never imagined that actually in your head, you had these skills that were being intertwined and tightened to get to reading. But it's a helpful, as a heuristic, it's a helpful way to keep in mind what's happening. So there's that. Also the Simple View is about the proximal and not the distal causes. And this gets to be a tricky thing for people to understand. 

[00:28:55] Susan Lambert: Yeah. What do you mean by that? 

[00:28:56] Wesley Hoover: Yeah. Proximal just means those things that are immediately connected to reading comprehension. Such that if you changed any of those things that are directly connected to reading comprehension concurrently, you would change reading comprehension concurrently.

[00:29:12] Wesley Hoover: Rather than distal factors, which are factors that influence reading comprehension, but not directly. They influence it through either word recognition or language comprehension. So for instance, in the Active View of Reading, you have these 18 variables that are listed, which all claim to be related, directly related to reading comprehension.

[00:29:34] Wesley Hoover: And that is a testable proposition. And in fact, if you measured those things like Kim did in her model of direct and indirect effects of reading, what you find is those factors don't g et directly connected to reading comprehension, they get connected to word recognition and language comprehension.

[00:29:53] Susan Lambert: Oh, gotcha. One or the other. Yeah. 

[00:29:55] Wesley Hoover: So they operate through those factors. 

[00:29:58] Susan Lambert: Yep. 

[00:29:58] Wesley Hoover: And so what's bad about thinking that everything is connected to reading comprehension, those 18 variables, for instance, in the Active View, is that if you change any one of them, you're going to change reading comprehension. And that's just not true.

[00:30:13] Wesley Hoover: So you take phonemic awareness. Yes, it's related early on. It's related to skill and reading comprehension later on. But the thing that actually runs it is its impact on word recognition. So if you make improvements in phonemic awareness, that's going to help you make improvements in word recognition. And those things, if language comprehension is not nil, will help you make improvements in reading comprehension. So that's why having models that show there are proximal and distal factors is important to keep in mind. 

[00:30:49] Susan Lambert: When we're looking at, first of all, if I was listening to this, I'd have to go back and rewind 'cause that's a, what you just said, there's lot of stuff there. Just another reminder that reading is complex, reading comprehension. There are lots of other models out there. Right? And so how do you help educators navigate those models or use those other models? Or, what's your advice? 

[00:31:12] Wesley Hoover: Yeah. So I'm a researcher, so, the gold standard for me is, how well does the model reflect what we know through research? Is it consistent with what we know through science? So, for instance, take the Reading Rope. We know those factors that are listed are important for reading comprehension. So that part of it is consistent with research.

[00:31:35] Wesley Hoover: The intertwining, where every one of those variables on the left side of the rope are equally related by the time you get to competent reading, to every other factor that's listed, that's just not the case. And so that's stretching the analogy, the metaphor, to cover things that aren't consistent with what we know.

[00:31:58] Wesley Hoover: So teachers have to be mindful of what part of this representation of reading comprehension is actually consistent with the science, and what parts are metaphors for thinking about the science. And so the metaphor that's actually true in the Reading Rope is that indeed, as you strengthen those skills, you will be able to strengthen reading comprehension, but they're not all equally related to each other. That's the thing. You got to stay away from. 

[00:32:29] Susan Lambert: Got it. Got it. You know, there's been criticisms of the Simple View of Reading that it's an old model. That it only works for English. I don't know what that means, it only works, but it's only relevant for English speaking. Can you address some of those misconceptions?

[00:32:43] Wesley Hoover: Yeah. So, it definitely is an old model. No doubt about that. And to me it's pretty remarkable that it still stands after now 40 years since its formal introduction. But the thing that's important is that it's not outdated in the sense that there is new research that shows the old research was wrong or was not sophisticated enough to be able to reveal the kinds of things that we can reveal now.

[00:33:11] Wesley Hoover: In fact, there is just a lot of research on the Simple View done in many languages that show that its main predictions are upheld. And those predictions are that the two components, word recognition and language comprehension, are important for reading comprehension. That they tend in most research to be identified as the sole variables, that is there is no other added variable that will help you better understand reading comprehension once you understand language comprehension and word recognition. So, they're the two variables, they're the sole proximal variables, and they are combined multiplicatively. That is, their combination is important. Not just some, but they're product is important.

[00:33:58] Wesley Hoover: And then finally, the biggest prediction in terms of reading difficulties is this idea that to be a good reader, you have to be not just average, you have to be good in both word recognition and language comprehension, and everywhere else—every other combination—will make you a poor reader. That is relative weakness in word recognition versus strength and language comprehension, vice versa, or weakness in both.

[00:34:26] Wesley Hoover: Those conditions will result in reading difficulties. The only way you get to strong reading comprehension is through strong word recognition and strong language comprehension, and that's been shown across many, many languages. Kids at different age levels from elementary to high school, different kinds of texts from narrative texts to expository texts, different expertise levels from kids reading stuff that they were very knowledgeable about, to kids reading stuff that they weren't very knowledgeable about.

[00:34:58] Wesley Hoover: Again, you have to have parallel assessments. You have to be able to say, "The words I'm recognizing and the language that I'm being asked to understand are comparable to the material that's written that I'm going to read." The Simple View won't work if what you do is take a narrative story for your language comprehension measure, and you take a physics text for your reading comprehension measure. You've got to worry about how parallel those measurements are across the three components. 

[00:35:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. It's interesting to me, when I look at things like the Reading Rope or the Active View or Dr. Kim's model, there's always, you can always see in those models word recognition and language comprehension. So they're still really apparent in those other models. 

[00:35:45] Wesley Hoover: Right. And as I said earlier, those have been the dominant factors in reading research since the late 1800s. 

[00:35:53] Susan Lambert: Hmm. That's so incredible. That's incredible! I haven't been around that long. I've been around a long time. 

[00:36:01] Wesley Hoover: They're in these books behind me, you know.

[00:36:05] Susan Lambert: Well, this episode is really helping us to kick off our new season. Like I said, it's going to be all about comprehension. 

[00:36:11] Wesley Hoover: Because I think one, it's one of the two critical components to reading comprehension. But this interplay of language and knowledge of the world, "How do I take what I know and express it in language and vice versa? How do I take language that I can read and pull out of it scenarios that are consistent with my knowledge of the world?" Those things are very important. And I always say that if you're a teacher thinking about language comprehension, whatever time you devote to helping people understand language, if you can be effective in doing that, you'll never waste a kid's time.

[00:36:54] Wesley Hoover: You might waste their time if they already know the stuff you're talking about, but if you're effectively addressing language comprehension, it will always be helpful to a kid. And that's not how word recognition works because once kids get to implicit learning where they know what the game is, they have enough alphabetic coding skill that they can figure out words that they encounter that they've never encountered before. Once you get to that implicit learning, if you're still teaching them phonics, you're really wasting their time because they already have the skills to be able to do it for themselves. It's really critical early on when they don't have the insight to be able to be explicit and to teach those things.

[00:37:37] Wesley Hoover: But once you get to a certain level, it's not clear where that level is, but once you get to that level where they seem to be able to pick it up on their own, then instruction and word recognition is not going to be very helpful. What they need to do is read. 

[00:37:52] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing I love about language comprehension. And this is another aha I've had late in my life, is that the sky's the limit with language comprehension. Even I can develop better language comprehension as an old lady. 

[00:38:07] Wesley Hoover: So, when we think about the difference between word recognition and language comprehension, where we describe word recognition as asymptotic, which means your skill grows and it grows pretty rapidly in the early years, but then it gets to level off at a point where over time, it doesn't increase very much. You're now so good at it, you can recognize any new word quickly and accurately that you encounter. So it's leveled off. 

[00:38:33] Susan Lambert: Right. 

[00:38:34] Wesley Hoover: But language comprehension is unbounded. And it's unbounded not so much because of the language part of it, because of the knowledge of the world and being able to express the knowledge of the world in language, that's always a key difficulty, and it's something you work on for your entire life. 

[00:38:53] Susan Lambert: Hmm. That's so exciting. There's a lot that you gave us to think about here. So any final thoughts or advice for listeners as it relates to the Simple View? 

[00:39:04] Wesley Hoover: Yeah, I think one piece of advice is about science in general. And as I said earlier, science is all about falsification, about making predictions and showing that something isn't true. Just because you can't show that it isn't true doesn't mean that it is true. So you always have to keep in mind that science may change. We may get new insights, we may learn things that reading works in different ways than we thought it worked.

[00:39:30] Wesley Hoover: And so you always have to keep that in mind that, you don't really know exactly how this works. You just know that so far there have been lots of tests, that have been designed to show that the Simple View is false, and they, for the most part haven't showed it yet. So, we have confidence that we're on the right track when it comes to the Simple View of Reading.

[00:39:54] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Hmm. Well, Dr. Hoover, it was such a pleasure to have you on today. Again, I'm sure our listeners are going to listen to this episode more than once because there's a lot of rich information in there. We appreciate you taking your time and appreciate you addressing this very important topic. 

[00:40:09] Wesley Hoover: Well, thank you so much. It's been a fun conversation. It's always great to talk about the complexities of reading and how those things can be better understood. 

[00:40:19] Susan Lambert: Thank you. That was Dr. Wesley A. Hoover. Check out the show notes for a link to his article with William E. Tunmer, the Primacy of Science in Communicating Advances in the Science of Reading.

[00:40:35] Susan Lambert: Remember, we would love to tackle your comprehension-related questions on an episode this season. Please visit amplify.com/sormailbag to submit your questions. Extra points for anyone who submits their question as an audio message. Next time we're diving into one of the gateways to comprehension, orthographic mapping. I'll be joined by Dr. Katie Pace Miles, an author of the wonderful recent book, Making Words Stick. 

[00:41:06] Guest: So you don't teach orthographic mapping, 'cause again, that's a cognitive process. But you can facilitate, support long-term storage of words. 

[00:41:15] Susan Lambert: That's coming up next time. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.