Simple View of Reading

The simple view of reading is a theory of reading comprehension proposed by researchers Philip Gough and William Tunmer in a 1986 paper, holding that reading comprehension is the product of two distinct component skills, decoding and linguistic comprehension, commonly expressed as reading comprehension equals decoding multiplied by language comprehension, such that a near-zero level of either component results in near-zero overall comprehension regardless of how strong the other component is. Decoding refers to the ability to translate printed text into recognizable words, while linguistic comprehension refers to the ability to understand spoken language once the words are known, and the framework was intended partly to clarify why some struggling readers have difficulty specifically with decoding while others can decode fluently but still fail to understand what they read. The theory has been extensively tested and remains influential in reading research and literacy assessment, providing a widely used framework for diagnosing whether a student's reading difficulty stems primarily from weak decoding, weak language comprehension, or both.