Wesley A Hoover

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Cognitive Psychologist and Executive Officer (retired) at Southwest Educational Development Laboratory / American Institutes for Research

Common depictions of the simple view of reading (SVR), in both research and practice, describe reading comprehension difficulties by using the dichotomous variables of “poor” and “good” for each of its three constructs. But these fail to accurately capture the role the product of the two subcomponents of word recognition and language comprehension...

A recent article in this journal claims that the simple view of reading represents a long‐outdated account of what underlies the ability to read. Its authors argue that if teachers are to be better informed about what is known about reading then the simple view must be replaced by a more current model, one that captures the substantial progress tha...

In this chapter we first discuss core instructional programs, focusing on the early elementary school grades where reading is largely taught. We contrast two main types of programs and describe what is known about instructional program effectiveness. We then turn to instructional components. We revisit the work of the National Reading Panel and its...

In this chapter we first discuss what standards are and why making links to the cognitive requirements of reading are critical for their effective use in practice. We then introduce a standards map, define its structure, and apply it to two sets of standards drawn from the most widely used reading standards in the United States, the Common Core of...

Having concentrated to this point on specifying the cognitive skills that underlie reading and learning to read, we now focus on the application of this knowledge to teaching and learning. In the remaining chapters of this book (Chaps. 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13) we show how reading professionals can use the Cognitive Foundations Framework to build coher...

In this chapter we first describe our rationale for writing the book: To help reading professionals bring an empirically grounded coherence to their practices through an understanding of the cognitive requirements underlying reading and learning to read. We discuss the book’s focus and unique features, including its descriptions of the major cognit...

In this chapter we discuss the cognitive skills needed to master the two main components of reading, language comprehension and word recognition. For language comprehension, we first present an information processing model of the stages needed to convert speech sound to meaning in a linguistic system. We use the model to frame our thinking about th...

We now describe how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can provide a general understanding of reading within writing systems that represent the phonology of a language. Below we first describe the key, general features of phonologically-based writing systems and the broadened definitions needed in the Cognitive Foundations Framework to accommodate...

In this chapter we define reading and its essential relationship with language, discussing how this constrains our understanding of literacy. We discuss the Simple View of Reading (SVR), which serves as the basis for the Cognitive Foundations of Reading, and we describe its three constituent cognitive capacities – word recognition, language compreh...

There is a simple idea in what we are presenting in this book: Use what would-be readers must know to guide what reading professionals must do. The former is based on understanding the cognitive underpinnings of reading and its acquisition – it is about knowing what knowledge-skill sets are required in reading and learning to read and why some must...

In this chapter we discuss assessment mappings onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework, providing two examples to show how they are structured in their different contexts and how they can be used to inform assessment issues in reading. Our goal in presenting them is to help reading professionals learn to apply the mapping processes so they can use...

In this chapter, we first present the complete Cognitive Foundations Framework, combining the cognitive elements that underlie reading with those that underlie reading acquisition. We close the chapter by revisiting our introductory remarks about what we said the framework would do to help reading professionals better understand reading and learnin...

Having described the cognitive foundations of both reading and learning to read, we now turn to the applications of the Cognitive Foundations Framework as an aid to understanding the development of reading skills as well as reading difficulty during such development. We first describe what reading development looks like within the framework of the...

In this chapter we first discuss differentiated instruction and how it might apply to those who are not making progress in reading relative to their peers. We follow this with a discussion of response-to-intervention as a multi-tiered system of support and how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can help reading professionals think about using such...

In this chapter we describe different types of frameworks and the purposes they serve. We discuss the features of the Cognitive Foundations Framework, its structure, and the four essential characteristics of its basic unit, a cognitive foundation. We briefly describe its two main sections, the foundations underlying reading and those underlying lea...

We are cognitive scientists and we welcome the opportunity to have a conversation with reading professionals in the field. These include reading teachers, specialists, interventionists, coordinators, and coaches. It also includes those who are learning to serve in these roles, as well as the higher education professionals getting them ready for suc...

This book serves as a succinct resource on the cognitive requirements of reading. It provides a coherent, overall view of reading and learning to read, and does so in a relatively sparse fashion that supports retention. The initial sections of the book describe the cognitive structure of reading and the cognitive foundation upon which that structur...

This article presents an overview of a conceptual framework designed to help reading professionals better understand what their students are facing as they learn to read in alphabetic writing systems. The US National Reading Panel (NRP) recommended five instructional components for improving reading outcomes but presented these instructional compon...

In this article, we provide some comments on the simple view of reading (SVR), now some 30 years after its initial proposal and empirical work (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). We begin with an overview of what the SVR is as a conceptual model, as well as what it is not. We follow this with comments, in turn, on three papers presented i...

Patterns of possible relationships between phonological recoding skill and three conceptually distinct aspects of reading are considered. The analysis draws attention to two complicating factors; first, the possibility that the different patterns of possible relationships may apply differentially across beginning readers of varying skill levels, an...

We argue in this chapter that reading skill is best described as the product of decoding and listening comprehension skills. After summarizing both the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence in support of this simple view of the proximal causes of reading, we consider the question of reading failure, reviewing evidence bearing on three models...

discuss how children learn to read and what processes are centrally involved / draws attention to the importance of distinguishing between the process of learning to read, the process of skilled reading, and the process of reading instruction / describes a model of the proximal causes of individual differences in reading comprehension performance /...

A simple view of reading was outlined that consisted of two components, decoding and linguistic comprehension, both held to be necessary for skilled reading. Three predictions drawn from the simple view were assessed in a longitudinal sample of English-Spanish bilingual children in first through fourth grade. The results supported each prediction:...

This six-year longitudinal study examined the relations between current schooling practices and the language and reading achievement of a large sample of low-income Hispanic children who began their schooling in bilingual classrooms in Texas. The study examined the children’s language on entry into school and thereafter. Standardized test data were...