Children’s reading difficulties, language, and reflections on the simple view of reading

Abstract

Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to guide the classification of reading disorders. This paper discusses how weaknesses in either or both of components of the Simple View are implicated in children’s reading comprehension difficulties. It concludes with reflections on the strengths and limitations of the Simple View as a theoretical and practical framework to guide our understanding of reading comprehension and its development.

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Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties
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Children’s reading difficulties, language, and
reflections on the simple view of reading
Kate Nation
To cite this article: Kate Nation (2019) Children’s reading difficulties, language, and reflections
on the simple view of reading, Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 24:1, 47-73, DOI:
10.1080/19404158.2019.1609272
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LEARNING DIFFICULTIES AUSTRALIA EMINENT
RESEARCH AWARD WINNER 2018
Children’s reading difficulties, language, and reflections on
the simple view of reading
Kate Nation
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
ABSTRACT
Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on
a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the
Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the
product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehen-
sion. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension
and provides a good framework to guide the classification of read-
ing disorders. This paper discusses how weaknesses in either or
both of components of the Simple View are implicated in children’s
reading comprehension difficulties. It concludes with reflections on
the strengths and limitations of the Simple View as a theoretical and
practical framework to guide our understanding of reading com-
prehension and its development.
The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension: for the reader to reconstruct the mental
world of the writer. As skilled readers, this usually feels pretty effortless and comprehen-
sion flows naturally as we read along. This sense of ease is misleading, however, as it
belies the complexity of what we do as we read, even when a text is simple and
straightforward. A whole range of cognitive and linguistic operations are at play, from
identifying individual words through to making inferences about situations that are not
fully described in the text (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). This complexity means that
finding a simple answer to questions like “how does reading comprehension develop”
and “why does it sometimes fail”quickly becomes an impossible task.
Against this complexity, enter the Simple View of Reading. This was first described by
Gough and Tunmer in 1986, and supported with data in a follow-up paper by Hoover
and Gough (1990). Together, these two papers have been cited over 5000 times in the
academic literature (source: Google Scholar, January 2019) and the influence of the
Simple View has been building in educational policy and practice (e.g., Rose, 2006). I was
fortunate to begin my career as a post-doc working with Maggie Snowling, employed on
a project inspired by the Simple View—and from our first paper onwards (Nation &
Snowling, 1997), it provided the framework within which we set our work. Over 20 years
later, my goal in this paper is to consider the question “why do some children find
reading comprehension difficult”from the perspective of the Simple View, and by
discussing some of the research it has motivated.
CONTACT Kate Nation kate.nation@psy.ox.ac.uk
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES
2019, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 47–73
https://doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2019.1609272
© 2019 Learning Difficulties Australia
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.

I begin by introducing the Simple View of reading and outlining some of the
evidence that supports it. Part II will consider reading comprehension in children who
struggle to read words. In Part III, attention turns to poor comprehenders—children who
read words adequately but nevertheless have reading comprehension difficulties.
Finally, in Part IV, I offer some reflections on the Simple View of reading and consider
its many strengths, as well as some limitations.
Part I: introducing the Simple View of reading
What is the Simple View?
Imagine yourself a fluent speaker of a foreign language but with no knowledge of its
written form. Reading comprehension would fail as you would have no ability to access
meaning from print. If the text was read to you, however, understanding would follow,
via listening. An alternative scenario is equally easy to imagine. It would be quite
possible for you to learn to assign acceptable pronunciations to words printed in
a foreign language, but this would not mean that you were able to comprehend what
had been written in that language.
The Simple View of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) elegantly
captures the essence of these scenarios by stating that reading comprehension is the product
of two sets of skills, decoding and linguistic comprehension (RC = D x LC, illustrated in Figure 1).
We will return to definitions shortly but for present purposes, decoding can be defined as the
ability to identify words in print and linguistic comprehension as the ability to understand
spoken language. The logical case for the Simple View is clear and compelling: both decoding
and linguistic comprehension are necessary for reading comprehension and neither alone is
sufficient. Like a fluent speaker of a foreign language who has never seen it written down, if
a child cannot decipher words from print they have no facility to understand written language,
no matter how sophisticated their understanding in the oral domain might be. Similarly, being
able to decipher words brings no guarantee that a child will understand what it is they have
read. The Simple View assumes that once written input is decoded,reading comprehension is
achieved via exactly the same processes used to understand spoken language. If those
processes are absent or not working well, reading comprehension will also fail, even if the
material has been decoded perfectly. The Simple View also states that the relative contribu-
tions of decoding and linguistic comprehension to reading comprehension should change
Figure 1. The Simple View of reading.
48 K. NATION

over time. Early on, reading comprehension is highly constrained by limitations in decoding. As
children get older and decoding skills increase, the correlation between linguistic comprehen-
sion and reading comprehension strengthens. This reflects the fact that once a level of
decoding mastery has been achieved, reading comprehension is ultimately constrained by
how well an individual understands spoken language.
It is hard to argue with the underlying principles of the Simple View, or with the evidence
base that now supports it. For example, Lervag, Hulme, and Melby-Lervag (2018)followed
nearly 200 Norwegian children as they learned to read. They measured decoding and
linguistic comprehension in multiple ways to form latent variables to capture each con-
struct. Nearly all of the variation in reading comprehension at 7.5 years was captured by the
two constructs, decoding and linguistic comprehension. Other studies taking a similar
approach have found the same (e.g., Language and Reading Research Consortium
[LARRC] & Chui, 2018; Hjetland et al., 2019; Lonigan, Burgess, & Schatschneider, 2018)and
findings are robust across alphabetic (Florit & Cain, 2011) and non-alphabetic writing
systems (Ho, Chow, Wong, Waye, & Bishop, 2012). There is also evidence to support the
changing pattern of associations between decoding, linguistic comprehension and reading
comprehension over time, with the correlation between linguistic comprehension and
reading comprehension strengthening, as children’s decoding skills increase (Catts, Adlof,
Hogan, & Weismer, 2005;García&Cain,2014; LARRC, 2015). Taken together, this evidence
base provides overwhelming support for the Simple View, including the principle that it
“does not deny the complexity of reading, but asserts that such complexities are restricted
to either of the two components”(Hoover & Gough, 1990,p.150).
Defining decoding and linguistic comprehension
What exactly is meant by “decoding”and “linguistic comprehension”? Starting with decoding,
this has been operationalised in different ways in different studies. Some experiments have
compared words and nonwords while others have investigated whether fluency is a better
index than accuracy (e.g., Adlof, Catts, & Little, 2006;LARRC,2015). Going back to the original
article, it is clear that Gough and Tunmer (1986) themselves grappled with how best to define
decoding. They explained that it can refer to the overt “sounding-out”of a word (sometimes
termed phonological decoding or alphabetic decoding), perhaps as measured by nonword
reading. But, they argued, this is not what good reading comprehension demands. Instead,
comprehension in skilled readers depends on high quality input from a word recognition
system that identifies words quickly and precisely (Perfetti, 2008). For the Simple View to
adequately describe skilled reading, “decoding”needs to be defined and measured by some-
thing that captures this fluency and expertise. At the same time however, this definition does
not work for children at the outset of learning to read as their word recognition system is not
yet in place and reading is far from fluent and expert. What needs to be captured by the term
“decoding”is dependent on the reading level of the individual.
At the heart of this issue is the need to consider learning and development. The
beauty of the Simple View is that it explains variation in a way that is timeless: the
equation RC = D x LC works for beginning readers as it does skilled readers, assuming
the constructs have been measured appropriately. Critically however, the Simple View
does not, on its own, explain how development happens—how children move from
overt and laborious phonological decoding to reading words effortlessly and fluently.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 49

For that, we need focussed and precise cognitive models that are developmentally
informed. There is consensus that phonological decoding provides the initial foundation
for learning to read words in English (e.g., Ehri, 2005; Share, 1995). From this starting
point, children gradually accumulate orthographic knowledge via reading experience.
This is a slow process of building expertise through which children harness their powers
of perception, memory and language to learn and to generalise (see Castles et al., 2018).
The Simple View does not explain in detail how any of this is achieved. Nor does it
intend to. Instead it provides a theoretical framework to help us understand variation in
reading comprehension across individuals at any particular time-point. How “decoding”
is defined and measured needs to reflect the appropriate developmental time-point, and
also familiarity with the words being read. Learning is likely to proceed in an item-based
fashion, so that at any point in time a person may be reading some words slowly and
only with great effort, while other words are read rapidly and efficiently with less
reliance on phonological decoding (Castles & Nation, 2006; Share, 1995).
Let us now turn to the other component of the Simple View, linguistic comprehension.
This was defined by Hoover and Gough (1990,p.131)as“the ability to take lexical informa-
tion (i.e., semantic information at the word level) and derive sentence and discourse inter-
pretations”. At a descriptive level this captures exactly what has to happen for reading (and
language) comprehension to be successful. But how should linguistic comprehension be
measured? A common approach has been to use listening comprehension, typically mea-
sured using a reading comprehension test but one that has been adapted so that children
listen to the text rather than read it themselves. Some studies have argued that another
factor, be it vocabulary, inference-making or working memory, makes a direct contribution
to reading comprehension (e.g., Oakhill & Cain, 2012; Ouellette & Beers, 2010;Tunmer&
Chapman, 2012). A different approach has been to construct a latent variable that taps
linguistic comprehension in a broad sense, drawing on multiple indicators. For example,
Hjetland et al. (2019) formed a single factor from measures of vocabulary, grammar, listening
comprehension and verbal working memory. In line with the central tenet of the Simple
View, variations in performance on this latent factor, in combination with variations in
decoding, predicted almost all of the variation in children’s reading comprehension at
7 years of age. There is also good evidence that variation in listening comprehension is itself
a consequence of variation in underlying oral language. Lervåg et al. (2018)assessed
7.5 year-olds’vocabulary, grammar, verbal working memory and inference making skills.
Together, these abilities predicted the children’s listening comprehension.
Drawing across these studies, a strong case can be made that linguistic comprehension is
broadly captured by listening comprehension, that listening comprehension itself sub-
sumes children’s vocabulary, grammar and language processing abilities and that these
abilities (along with decoding) predict reading comprehension (LARRC & Chui, 2018;
Foorman, Petscher, & Herrera, 2018; Hjetland et al., 2019; Lonigan et al., 2018). As per our
discussion of decoding, however, this does not explain how reading comprehension
happens, nor how it develops. Comprehension is not typically a verbatim record of what’s
been read, replicating its form and structure. Instead, as people read or listen, they build
a mental model, sometimes called a situation model, culminating in a rich interpretation of
the text that goes beyond what is explicitly stated. The text is the substrate that allows the
reader to pull in relevant information, including, for example, the meanings of words, rules
of syntax, background knowledge and an appreciation of how the world works. This
50 K. NATION

information is then processed to make connections, draw inferences and construct
intended meaning. The Simple View does not tell us how any of this achieved. For that,
once again we need to look to detailed cognitive models. An important lesson from the
extensive literature on reading comprehension is that it is not one thing that can be
measured by a single indicator. Instead, reading comprehension is the product of
a complex set of cognitive and linguistic factors operating across a text (for discussion,
see Castles et al., 2018; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), in interaction with the nature of the text and
the purpose of the reading situation.
This discussion of definitional issues is not to say that the Simple View is false or
limited as a framework to help us understand variation in reading comprehension. On
the contrary, the Simple View is extraordinarily successful in this regard. When measured
comprehensively and reliably, variations in decoding and linguistic comprehension
capture individual differences in reading comprehension almost perfectly (Hjetland
et al., 2019); this means that the terms decoding and linguistic comprehension have
utility, if we accept that they denote complex constructs rather than explaining
a particular cognitive process. At the same time, however, to move us beyond capturing
variance to understand how cognitive and linguistic processes happen—and why they
might go awry in children with poor reading and language –we need to attend to finer
level definitions. In keeping with the principles of the Simple View, I use the terms
decoding and linguistic comprehension in a neutral way throughout this paper as labels
to note “things to do with identifying words”and “things to do with understanding
spoken language”respectively.
Varieties of reading disorder within the Simple View
Gough and Tunmer (1986) used the Simple View to classify different types of reading
problems. To illustrate, Figure 2 shows decoding and linguistic comprehension plotted
orthogonally. Individuals can be placed into this multidimensional space according to
their abilities on tasks that tap each of the two constructs.
For children falling in quadrant A, reading comprehension is constrained by poor decoding,
whereas poor linguistic comprehension constrains those in quadrant D. Quadrant C captures
Figure 2. Classifying reading disorders within the Simple View of reading.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 51

children who are poor at both decoding and linguistic comprehension. The logic of the Simple
View is that all three varieties of reading disorder—termed dyslexia, hyperlexia and garden-
variety poor reader in the original paper—result in poor reading comprehension but for
different reasons. Nomenclature may vary, but there’s plenty of evidence for these distinct
reading profiles. It’sraretoseementionof“garden-variety”poor readers in the more recent
literature, but children with co-occurring dyslexia and language impairment are typically
plotted in quadrant C (Bishop & Snowling, 2004;Cattsetal.,2005). This quadrant is discussed
in the next section, along with quadrant A (“classic”dyslexia). Turning to quadrant D, there are
complexities with the term hyperlexia (Nation, 1999). That is not to say that a quadrant
Dreadingprofile does not exist. These children are more typically described as poor (or less
skilled) comprehenders. We will return to discuss quadrant D in Part III.
Part II: reading comprehension in children with poor decoding
Reading comprehension tends to be low in children and young people with dyslexia (e.g.,
Ferrer et al., 2015; Shaywitz et al., 1999). This is considered a direct consequence of poor
decoding, and dyslexia is usually associated with quadrant A in the Simple View (e.g., Gough
&Tunmer,1986; Stanovich & Siegal, 1994). Rather surprisingly, however, few studies have
investigated the nature of reading comprehension in dyslexia in much detail. Bruck (1990)
assessed reading comprehension in a group of adults who had a history of developmental
dyslexia. Although the mean performance of the group was low-average (centile score of
41), there was huge variability in performance, with centile scores varying from 6 to 97. This
shows that some children with dyslexia go on to make excellent progress in reading
comprehension while others do not. Comparing those adults with good vs. poor reading
comprehension, Bruck (1990) found no differences in word or nonword reading. However,
the two groups did differ in vocabulary: poor reading comprehension was associated with
vocabulary deficits whereas good reading comprehension was not. This finding can be
accommodated within the Simple View, on the assumption that while all of the participants
had poor decoding, only a subset (those with low vocabulary) also had poor linguistic
comprehension. Arguably, as decoding skills strengthened through development, adults
with good vocabulary (quadrant A) were able to make gains in reading comprehension
whereas those with low vocabulary (quadrant C) did not.
Bruck’s study tells us that some people with a diagnosis of dyslexia also have broader
language problems. These problems are not unusual, with weaknesses in vocabulary,
grammar and discourse-level processing being seen in many studies (e.g., Catts, Fey,
Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002; McArthur, Hogben, Edwards, Heath, & Mengler, 2000). There has
been a tendency to consider these broader language problems as a consequence of the
deficit in phonological processing that underpins dyslexia, or of reading failure itself. For
example, rather than a genuine problem with grammar, poor performance on a test of
complex syntax might be a consequence of a phonological processing bottleneck disrupting
working memory (e.g., Shankweiler et al., 1995). Or, if dyslexic children read less, they have
less opportunity to build vocabulary via reading, such that vocabulary deficits emerge over
time (Stanovich, 1986). Although these factors are likely to be at play, it is now abundantly
clear that they are not the whole story. First, in adults with a history of developmental
dyslexia, oral language accounts for direct variance in reading comprehension, even when
decoding and phonological skills are controlled (e.g., Ransby & Swanson, 2003). Stronger
52 K. NATION

evidence comes from family risk studies.These have consistently found that children who go
on to receive a diagnosis of dyslexia in mid-childhood show language difficulties as infants
and toddlers, well before reading failure could exert its influence (for meta-analysis across 21
independent studies and 95 articles, see Snowling & Melby-Lervåg, 2016). These findings
confirm poor language as a precursor; they also add to the growing evidence base that sees
low language as an important factor within a complex multiple risk model of the disorder
(Snowling & Melby-Lervåg, 2016;Pennington,2006). Such evidence also forces us to consider
the overlap between dyslexia and spoken language difficulties, and how best to characterise
the two types of difficulty. While a full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this paper (for
further detailed discussion, see Adlof & Hogan, 2018; Bishop & Snowling; 2004; Catts et al.,
2005; Nash, Hulme, Gooch, & Snowling, 2013; Ramus, Marshall, Rosen, & van der Lely, 2013), it
is important to touch on some of this literature where it relates to reading comprehension
outcomes in children with dyslexia.
Some studies following at-risk children have now traced the path from pre-school language
to school-aged reading comprehension. Broadly, these findings sit comfortably with the
Simple View. Hulme, Nash, Gooch, Lervåg and Snowling (2015) analysed data from the
Wellcome Reading and Language project. This longitudinal study recruited pre-school children
at high risk for poor reading (they had a diagnosis of developmental language disorder, or
were at family risk for dyslexia) and followed them through the primary school years. Hulme
et al. (2015) found that language skills (linguistic comprehension) at 3.5 years made a direct
contribution to reading comprehension at 8.5 years, and an indirect contribution via their
effect on decoding at 5.5 years, which also influenced reading comprehension at 8.5 years.
Similar findings were reported by Van Settern et al. (2018) who found that vocabulary in Grade
3 explained a substantial amount of variance in Grade 6 in the Dutch Dyslexia Program,
a longitudinal study following Dutch children at family risk for dyslexia. Snowling, Hayiou-
Thomas, Nash & Hulme (in preparation). categorised children from the Wellcome project into
four groups, based on their decoding and oral language profile at 8 years: pure dyslexia
(quadrant A), pure developmental language disorder (DLD; quadrant D), co-morbid dyslexia
+DLD (quadrant C) or unimpaired (quadrant B). As predicted by the Simple View, all three
impaired groups showed poor reading comprehension at 8 years. Interestingly, when re-
assessed 12 months later, the pure dyslexia group had improved in reading comprehension,
relative to both the DLD and the combined group, although they were still impaired relative to
their typically-developing peers. Finally, the combined group showed the most severe deficits
in reading comprehension at both time points, reflecting underlying weaknesses in both
decoding and oral language.
Drawing across these at-risk studies, there is clearevidenceinlinewithGoughandTunmer’s
view that “there is a common denominator in every case of dyslexia, a deficit which could
stand well as the proximal cause of the disorder. This is an inability to decode”(1986,p.8).This
exerts a direct influence on reading comprehension. Whether there are additional negative
influences on reading comprehension from linguistic comprehension depends on the status of
achild’s oral language. Rather striking is the proportion of children with dyslexia who have
language weaknesses, placing them into quadrant C rather than the traditional home of
dyslexia, quadrant A. For example, of the 50 poor decoders identified by Snowling, Nash,
Gooch, Hayiou-Thomas, and Hulme (2019)at8years,only21had“pure”dyslexia; the other 29
also showed significant levels of language impairment. One might argue that this high figure
reflects the nature of the at-risk sample. However, it chimes with other work showing that
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 53

approximately 50% of children with a diagnosis of dyslexia have language weaknesses
measured concurrently in a sample not recruited for family risk (e.g., McArthur et al., 2000). It
seems that when researchers measureorallanguageinchildrenidentified on the basis of
a diagnosis of dyslexia, it is not at all unusual to find high levels of poor oral language (see also
Adlof & Hogan, 2018).
Given the lack of research investigating reading comprehension in children with poor
decoding, especially from studies that have not recruited on the basis of family risk,
I took the opportunity to look into one of my own longitudinal datasets charting reading
development from pre-school through the school years. The primary aim of the original
project was to identify poor comprehenders and chart their reading and language
development (Nation, Cocksey, Taylor, & Bishop, 2010; see Part III). However, this rich
dataset also provided an opportunity to explore patterns of reading comprehension in
children identified on the basis of poor decoding.
The learning to read longitudinal dataset
This study recruited a large and unselected sample of children on school entry shortly before
their 5
th
birthday, and followed their reading and language development through the
primary school years. Seventeen primary schools serving a socially mixed range of neigh-
bourhoods in Oxfordshire took part in the study. All children beginning these schools at the
start of the study were invited to participate. Informed consent from parents was received for
242 children (141 girls and 108 boys). The children were first assessed within 3 months of
starting school, corresponding to a mean age of approximately 4 years and 10 months.
Our primary focus here is with data from two time points: when the children first entered
school (Reception class, Mage = 4.83 years, SD = 0.34, N= 242) and three years later (Year 2
in school, Mage = 7.23 years, SD =0.35;N= 202). To compare profiles across language and
literacy tests that had been standardised on different populations, raw scores on these tests
were converted to z-scores, using the mean and standard deviation of the entire sample
assessed at each time point; for ease of reference, z-scores were transformed to standard
scores (M=100,SD =15).
Reading skills at 7 years across the entire sample
At this time point, the children completed both the word (Word Reading Efficiency) and
nonword (Phonemic Decoding) component of the Test for Word Reading Efficiency
(TOWRE; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1999). This requires children to read aloud as
many words (or nonwords) as possible in 45 s and the number read correctly is
converted to a measure of word (or nonword) reading fluency. The Neale Analysis of
Reading Ability-II (NARA-II; Neale, 1997) provided an assessment of text reading. In this
test, children read aloud short passages of text (reading accuracy) and are then asked
questions to assess literal and inferential understanding (reading comprehension).
Finally, the British Ability Scales Word Reading subtest (Elliot, Smith, & McCullouch,
1996) provided an assessment of word reading. This is an untimed test in which children
are presented with single words and asked to read each aloud. As is clear from the data
summarised in Table 1, the correlation between performance across the different
measures of reading was high.
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Levels of reading comprehension in poor decoders at 7 years
Next we turn to those children who were poor at decoding. As discussed earlier, decoding is
defined and measured in different ways in different studies. Here, children were identified
on the basis of poor performance (standard score below 83) on the TOWRE, averaging
across the two subtests. Thirty-four children were identified; from now on, I refer to these
children as having a reading disorder (RD). Their performance across all reading assessments
is detailed in Table 2. While there is some variation, it is notable that performance is low
across the board, including in reading comprehension. It is also important to note that only
22 of the 34 RD children were able to complete the Neale Analysis: the other 12 struggled
with reading individual words to the extent that testing was abandoned. This means that
the text accuracy and comprehension scores reported in Table 2 underestimate the diffi-
culties experienced by the RD children; nevertheless, reading comprehension was very poor
with every child scoring below population average.
Oral language skills in children with RD at 7 years
Table 3 summarises the performance of the 34 children on five different measures of oral
language. Expressive vocabulary was measured using the vocabulary subtest from the
Wechsler Abbreviated Intelligence Scales (WASI, Wechsler, 1999). Children were asked to
provide definitions for words supplied by the experimenter. Sentence comprehension
was measured using the Comprehension subtest from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for
Children (WISC, Wechsler, 2003), a test which requires children to answer orally-
presented socially-relevant comprehension questions. Two subtests from the Clinical
Table 1. Correlation between different reading measures at 7 years across entire sample, N= 202.
Word Fluency Nonword Fluency Word Reading Text Accuracy Text Comprehension
Word Fluency
a
-
Nonword Fluency
b
.87 -
Word Reading
c
.95 .89 -
Text Accuracy
d
.88 .88 .93 -
Text Comp
d
.79 .80 .83 .87 -
All correlations are statistically significant, p< .01.
a
TOWRE Sight Word Efficiency;
b
TOWRE Phonemic Decoding;
c
BAS word reading;
d
Neale Analysis of Reading Ability.
Table 2. Performance of RD children on reading assessments at 7 years (standard scores derived
from the entire sample, N= 202).
Word Fluency
*a
Nonword Fluency
*b
Word Reading
c
Text Accuracy
d
Text Comprehension
d
N34 34 34 22 22
M75.99 82.54 77.99 78.80 79.95
SD 5.12 3.69 3.44 2.40 2.45
Minimum 67.58 79.15 70.88 74.79 74.13
Maximum 86.60 92.25 84.11 85.53 82.82
*indicates assessment used to select poor readers;
a
TOWRE Sight Word Efficiency;
b
TOWRE Phonemic Decoding;
c
BAS word reading;
d
Neale Analysis of Reading Ability.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 55

Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-3
UK
; Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2000) provided
an estimate of expressive and receptive language skills. Recalling Sentences requires
children to repeat sentences of increasing length and grammatical complexity;
Sentence Structure assesses acquisition of structural rules at the sentence level by asking
children to select a picture that matches the target sentence. Finally, in the Bus Story
(Renfrew, 1991) children listen to a narrative describing events in a picture book. They
then re-tell the story and their responses are analysed. Scores here reflect the informa-
tion content of their re-tells.
Averaging across the five tests produced a mean standard score of 88, right at the
end bottom end of normal range. However, this average hides a substantial amount of
variability. For each test, performance varied from extremely poor to good.
Comparison of “pure”RD and RD with poor language at 7 years
It is clear that some children with RD at 7 years of age also perform poorly on tasks
tapping oral language: in Simple View terms, they have poor linguistic comprehension
alongside poor decoding. To investigate further, I used Bishop et al.’s(2009) methodol-
ogy to classify a child as language impaired if they obtained at least two standard scores
more than 1.33SD below the population mean on the five oral language measures
described above. Of the 34 children with RD, 13 also met this criterion for language
impairment. The results of this classification exercise are summarised in upper part of
Table 4. For children with reading disorder only, scores were at the population average.
As to be expected, those classified as language impaired obtained scores well below the
normal range.
Despite large differences in oral language characterising the two subgroups, they
showed an identical pattern of reading achievement across the all the reading tests,
including reading comprehension (see Figure 3).
Table 4 also shows the performance of the two subgroups on three assessments of
phonological ability, namely two assessments of nonword repetition (the Children’s
Nonword Repetition Test, Gathercole et al., 1996 and from the Comprehensive Test of
Phonological Processing [CTOPP]; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999) and one measure
of phoneme deletion (also from the CTOPP). Both groups performed below average on
these tests, and there was no difference in profile or severity across the two groups.
Table 3. Performance of RD children on measures of oral language at 7 years (standard scores
derived from the entire sample, N= 202).
Expressive
Vocabulary
a
Recalling
Sentences
b
Sentence
Structure
b
Narrative
Content
c
Sentence
Comprehension
d
N34 34 34 31 34
M88.34 88.23 83.13 93.31 87.95
SD 13.53 12.40 16.16 16.57 14.75
Minimum 68.02 68.47 41.95 54.14 60.38
Maximum 120.13 128.04 116.8 126.25 113.64
a
WASI Vocabulary;
b
CELF;
c
Bus Story;
d
WISC Comprehension.
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In summary, children selected as having RD at 7 years of age, defined in terms of
poor performance on word and nonword reading fluency, also showed significant
impairments in reading comprehension (and phonological skills). Over a third of the
group could be classified as having a language impairment, placing them in quad-
rant C rather than quadrant A. Interestingly, having a concomitant language impair-
ment was not associated with more severe reading comprehension difficulties.
Despite relative strengths in oral language, reading comprehension was as poor in
the RD-only group as the RD+LI group.
Having identified children with RD at 7 years and classified them on the basis of oral
language at that time point, we now turn to look back at the data from the two
subgroups at school entry. Of interest is the children’s oral language at this time, before
the onset of reading.
Table 4. Comparison of RD children with and without language impairment at 7 years.
RD (N= 21) RD+LI (N= 13)
MSDM SD
Language classification tests
Expressive Vocabulary 95.04 11.22 77.52 9.40
Recalling Sentences 92.06 12.78 82.05 9.16
Sentence Structure 90.74 10.85 70.83 16.02
Narrative Content* 100.81 11.58 81.43 16.68
Sentence Comprehension 95.21 11.75 76.22 11.28
Phonological Skills
Phoneme Deletion 86.29 8.99 82.44 9.85
Nonword Rep: CTPP 87.69 15.39 82.05 11.86
Nonword Rep: CNRep 87.57 15.54 80.65 10.58
*N= 19 and 12.
Figure 3. Mean (SD) standard scores on reading assessments at 7 years.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 57

Looking backwards in time: oral language, phonological skills and emergent
literacy at school entry
The 34 children identified as RD at 7 years were 4.88 years old (SD = 0.37) at the first
assessment. Oral language was measured using three different tests. Expressive voca-
bulary was assessed using the vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Preschool and
Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI, Wechsler, 2002). Initial items require children to
name pictures but most items involve the child providing definitions for words supplied
by the assessor. Children also completed the Test for Reception of Grammar-2 (TROG-2,
Bishop, 2003). This measures children’s comprehension of sentences, with grammatical
complexity increasing over the test. Sentence comprehension was assessed using the
comprehension subtest from the WISC, as administered at 7 years. Performance is
plotted in Figure 4 for the 34 children identified as RD at 7 years, separated by language
status at 7 years.
Consistent with their later classification, children in the RD+LI group showed sub-
stantially lower levels of oral language at school entry than children in the RD group. As
the children were pre-readers, these language weaknesses cannot be attributed to lack
of language learning via reading. It is notable that the RD-only children obtained mean
language scores of 95, 93 and 93 for vocabulary, receptive grammar and sentence
comprehension respectively. While there was variation within the group, this generally
places the children within normal range, in contrast to those in the RD+LI group (recall
that standard scores were calculated from the entire sample of children who were
assessed at this time point, N= 242). Overall, these findings point to stability in language
skills, with profiles at school entry mirroring those seen three years later.
Five tests provided an assessment of the children’s phonological skills at school entry.
Phonological awareness was measured using two subtests from the CTOPP (Wagner et al.,
1999): Phoneme Elision, in which children delete an initial or final phoneme from orally
Figure 4. Mean (SD) standard scores on oral language measures at 5 years, as a function of reading
and language status at 7 years.
58 K. NATION

presented words, and Sound Matching, where children hear three words and are asked to
select which one starts (orends) with the same sound as a target item. We also administered
Rime Judgement, a task developed by Bird, Bishop, and Freeman (1995) to measure phono-
logical awareness in young children. Children selected from an array of four pictures the one
that rhymed with a target item. Nonword repetition was assessed using the Children’sTestof
Nonword Repetition (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1996) and the Nonword Repetition subtest
from the CTOPP.
As shown in Figure 5, the two subgroups did not differ in terms of phonological
awareness. It is important to note that performance across the entire sample was quite
low in terms of phoneme deletion and sound-matching, as to be expected given the age of
the children at this time point. As a consequence, the data must be interpreted cautiously.
On the rime task (where performance was stronger across the entire cohort), the RD-only
children scored within normal range, and performed better than the children in the RD+LI
group. This pattern was also evident across both measures of nonword repetition. It is
interesting to note that the RD-only children performed quite well across all measures of
phonological processing at school entry, yet by 7 years of age, they were below normal
range, and performed as poorly as the RD+LI children. This might reflect a pattern of
phonological skills becoming more impaired over time, as children with RD benefitless
from reciprocal links with reading and alphabetic knowledge (see Nation and Hulme (2011)
for a detailed investigation of this within the same dataset).
Turning to reading, most of the children in the entire sample were unable to read at
the start of the study. There was however a good amount of variation in letter knowl-
edge. Tellingly, given their future difficulties with word reading, letter knowledge was
low for the children who were later classified as RD-only and RD+LI (standard scores of
84 and 83 respectively).
Figure 5. Mean (SD) standard scores on phonological measures at 5 years, as a function of reading
and language status at 7 years.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 59

Looking forward in time: reading accuracy and reading comprehension at 8 and
10 years
While it is possible to classify children as RD and RD+LI at 7 years, this is a young age to
be measuring reading comprehension, especially in children with manifestly poor read-
ing at the word level. We had the opportunity to assess reading skills later in time, when
the children were 8 years of age (N= 20 RD and 11 RD+LI) and once again at 10 years of
age (N= 12 RD and 7 RD+LI). Performance on both the reading accuracy and reading
comprehension components of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability from these two
timepoints are plotted in Figure 6, along with data from 7 years. At no time point is
there any difference in reading skills between the RD-only and RD+LI subgroups; at
10 years of age, it is clear that the RD-only children are still poor at reading comprehen-
sion, despite their strengths in oral language. Figure 6 indicates some improvements
over time in both groups, but note that this upward trajectory reflects only small
differences in terms of standard score.
Summary and discussion
This exploration of the Learning to Read dataset shows that 7-year-olds with poor
decoding also show impairments in reading comprehension, in line with the principles
of the Simple View. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that reading comprehension
is compromised by poor decoding alone. Approximately one third of the sample showed
poor oral language at 7 years, and these difficulties were evident earlier in time, at
school entry. These findings align with data from family risk studies (Snowling & Melby-
Lervåg , 2016) and reinforce the need to consider children’s language skills as well as
their decoding ability.
A number of implications follow for both research and educational practice. For
research, there is a pressing need to look beyond standardised scores on an off-the-
shelf test of reading comprehension to consider the nature of reading comprehension in
children with poor decoding. It is surprising that few studies have looked at reading
Figure 6. Mean standard scores of Neale Analysis (accuracy and comprehension) scores over time, as
a function of reading and language status at 7 years.
60 K. NATION

comprehension itself in dyslexia. It would be interesting to vary question type, or use
methods such as eye tracking to investigate factors such as inference-making while
reading. Such experiments could address whether there are systematic differences in RD
children with and without concomitant oral language weaknesses. Longitudinal data are
also needed to help us to understand which children make progress in reading com-
prehension, and how.
The consistent finding that a substantial proportion of children identified on the basis
of poor decoding have co-occurring language problems highlights the need to assess
broader language skills in poor readers, and for intervention approaches to target
language as well as decoding. Duff, Fieldsend, Bowyer-Crane, Hulme, Smith, Gibbs and
Snowling (2008) identified a subgroup of poor readers who had not responded to an
intensive intervention programme targeting reading and phonology. As a group, these
children showed low language. Their expressive vocabulary was at the 5
th
centile, and
their performance on tests of grammatical skill corresponded to the 5.5 year old level—
yet they were nearly 8 years old. In contrast, poor decoders who had responded well to
the reading and phonology programme in previous studies achieved normal-for-age
vocabulary scores. These observations suggest that co-occurring language difficulties
place children at risk of being “treatment resistors”, meaning more intensive and
specialist provision is required, extending to rich oral language intervention as well as
instruction in decoding (see Duffet al., 2014; Fricke, Bowyer-Crane, Haley, Hulme, &
Snowling, 2013). Extending these research findings to educational practice can be
facilitated by collaborations between teachers and speech and language pathologists
(Adlof & Hogan, 2018; Snow, 2019).
Part III: poor comprehenders
Having reviewed poor decoding as a source of reading comprehension difficulty, we
now turn our attention to quadrant D. Poor comprehenders were first described in the
scientific literature by Oakhill (1982;1983;1984) who used the Neale Analysis of Reading
Ability to identify children who appear to have circumscribed difficulties with reading
comprehension. In this test, children read aloud short passages of text (generating
a score for reading accuracy) and then answer questions to assess their literal and
inferential understanding of the text, generating a score for reading comprehension.
Oakhill (1982) identified 7–8 year olds who were disproportionality poor at reading
comprehension, despite age-appropriate reading accuracy. Looking across the experi-
mental literature since Oakhill’s original work, studies have used different selection
criteria. This makes precise prevalence hard to estimate. Perhaps the most reliable
estimates come from nationally representative and large samples in the UK, extracted
from the data used in the standardisation of the York Assessment of Reading for
Comprehension (Snowling et al., 2009; Stothard, Hulme, Clarke, Barmby, & Snowling,
2010). In the primary school sample, 5.3% of children with age-appropriate levels of
word reading ability obtained reading comprehension standard scores below 77.5
(equating to more than 1.5 SDs below average for their age); in the secondary school
sample, the figure was 5%. Thus, poor comprehenders of this severity exist and this
profile of reading difficulty is not rare.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 61

As reviewed earlier, according to the Simple View, reading comprehension is the
product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. It follows from this that children
identified as poor comprehenders must have deficits either in decoding, linguistic
comprehension, or both. This logic forces the conclusion that reading comprehension
deficits cannot be specific, but instead must be related to weaknesses in one or both of
its component parts. For the children described above as having “specific”reading
comprehension impairments, which component is at fault?
As is to be anticipated given the selection methods used to identify poor comprehen-
ders, weak decoding is an unlikely explanation for the patterns of poor reading compre-
hension identified by Oakhill in her early studies. Subsequent research has bolstered this
conclusion. It is not the case that poor comprehenders have accurate-but-slow reading,
indicative of subtle decoding problems that cause a bottleneck and disrupt reading
comprehension: it is perfectly possible to identify poor comprehenders who have good
reading fluency alongside good reading accuracy. For example, Ricketts, Bishop and
Nation (2007) used assessments of word and nonword reading fluency (provided by the
TOWRE, Wagner et al., 1999) to identify and match poor comprehenders with control
children. These children were 8–10 years old. This leaves open the possibility that they
might have had poor decoding earlier in development and this has somehow left a lasting
legacy of less than optimal decoding, which in turn hampers reading comprehension. But
this does not seem to be the case. Reporting on data from the Learning to Read project
introduced in Part II, Nation et al. (2010) identified poor comprehenders in mid-childhood.
They then looked back in the dataset to chart reading development from its initial stages
onwards. Those children who went on to show a poor comprehender profile at 8 years
showed all the hallmarks of good decoding from the outset. They started school with
normal levels of letter knowledge, and throughout development they showed age-
appropriate reading fluency for words and nonwords, and text reading too. For children
identified as poor comprehenders then, weaknesses in decoding cannot explain why
reading comprehension is compromised.
Turning to the other component of the Simple View, there is plenty of evidence
demonstrating that poor comprehenders show impairments on tasks that tap linguistic
comprehension. Using a version of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability where the
children listened to the stories rather than read them, Nation and Snowling (1997)
found that poor comprehenders performed less well than control children. As discussed
earlier, listening comprehension is a broad construct: like reading comprehension itself,
there are many reasons why a child might find it difficult. Nation et al. (2004) made
a thorough investigation of 8–9 year-old poor comprehenders’oral language skills using
a range of standardised assessments that tapped phonological skills as well as vocabu-
lary, morphosyntax and the understanding of non-literal language. Consistent with
evidence from earlier experiments (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000; Nation & Snowling,
1998; Stothard & Hulme, 1995), the poor comprehenders performed as well as their
peers on the phonological tasks. However, on all other tests they performed less well
than the control children as a group, leading Nation et al. to conclude that low language
characterises many (but not all) poor comprehenders. Furthermore, a substantial min-
ority of the sample showed significant language difficulties and met criteria for specific
language impairment (now known as developmental language disorder: Bishop,
Snowling, Thompson, Greenhalgh, 2016).
62 K. NATION

An important question is whether these mild-to-moderate oral language weaknesses
might be a consequence of reading comprehension failure, rather than a precursor. This
is a plausible suggestion. Written language provides many opportunities to support
language development. Once children can read, they have the opportunity to learn new
words via reading (Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987) and to absorb the rich morpholo-
gical cues to meaning that are evident in spelling patterns (Rastle, 2018, Rastle, 2019).
Reading also provides experience with syntactic structures that are quite rare in con-
versation (Montag & McDonald, 2013). If poor comprehenders read less, this could
contribute to oral language deficits emerging over time as a consequence of this lack
of input from reading experience.
The Learning to Read Project provided an opportunity to test this hypothesis
directly. Nation et al. (2010) selected poor comprehenders on the basis of their
reading profile at 8 years. Tracing back in the dataset to when the children started
school, the children who went on to be identified as poor comprehenders at 8 years
on the basis of their reading profile showed low oral language at 4.5 years and
throughout the primary school years. Despite these language weaknesses, the poor
comprehenders showed age-appropriate phonological skills, consistent with the view
that relative strengths in phonological ability supported the development of word
reading, but relative weaknesses in other aspects of language contributed to the
children’sdifficulties with reading comprehension. Similar findings have been
reported in other retrospective longitudinal studies (Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006;
Elwér, Keenan, Olson, Byrne & Samuelsson, 2013; Petscher, Justice, & Hogan, in press).
Together, these findings show that oral language weaknesses precede reading devel-
opment in poor comprehenders, meaning that difficulties observed later in develop-
ment are not a straightforward consequence of lack of reading—although of course,
reciprocal influences are to be expected.
In summary, the profile of strengths in decoding but relative weaknesses in aspects of
oral language indicates that many poor comprehenders fit within quadrant D of the
Simple View. More generally, the oral language profile that characterises poor compre-
henders fits with what we have learned from typical development—that oral language
skills are highly associated with listening comprehension (Lervåg et al., 2018; LARRC,
2017), and that variation in oral language and listening comprehension is associated
with later reading comprehension (e.g., Hulme et al., 2015).
I have focused here on poor comprehenders—children identified on the basis of
their reading profile. The literature on children with DLD (identified on the basis of
primary impairments in oral language) also describes some children whose reading
profile fits within quadrant D. Many DLD children struggle with both decoding and
linguistic comprehension, consistent with a quadrant C reading profile. Some, how-
ever, can decode quite well, but as to be expected given deficits in oral language,
reading comprehension tends to be impaired (Catts et al., 2002;Nation&Norbury,
2005;Snowlingetal.,2019). These children are probably overlapping with those
identified as poor comprehenders—that is, when oral language is measured, some
(but not all) poor comprehenders meet criteria for DLD, and when reading is
measured, some (but not all) children with DLD show the same reading profile as
poor comprehenders.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 63

Why does reading comprehension go wrong for poor comprehenders?
The Simple View is helpful in reminding us that reading comprehension has its bases in
language comprehension. Once children can read words adequately, variation in reading
comprehension is strongly associated with variation in language comprehension more
generally. Beyond this truism, however, the Simple View does not provide further
specification as to why comprehension might fail. Reading comprehension is not “one
thing”; like language comprehension more generally, it is a complex construct, drawing
on a range of cognitive and linguistic capacities (for review, see Castles et al., 2018;
Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). Is it possible to further specify where in this complex set of
processes comprehension breaks down for poor comprehenders?
To address this question, experiments have compared poor comprehenders and
a control group on tasks hypothesised to be relevant to reading comprehension.
These experiments have found that poor comprehenders are less able to make infer-
ences (Cain & Oakhill, 1999), understand words or activate their meanings in context
(Nation & Snowling, 1998,1999), connect ideas in text (Ehrlich & Remond, 1997),
remember verbal information (Hua & Keenan, 2014) and monitor their comprehension
(Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005). They are also less skilled at learning and remembering
new words and adding to their knowledge (Cain, Oakhill & Elbro, 2003; Ricketts, Bishop,
& Nation, 2008). It is hard to derive conclusions across different experiments, not least
because of methodological limitations such as sample size, and variations in age and the
methods used to define samples. Nevertheless, two observations are noteworthy. First,
there is no “magic profile”that captures all children and totally “explains”their poor
comprehension. This reflects both the complexity of comprehension and the difficulty of
separating one component of comprehension cleanly. As Castles et al. (2018) discuss in
detail, comprehension is not only multifaceted with factors interacting in multiple ways
during the process of reading, it is also complex developmentally, as factors interact and
change over time. Second, common to most of the experiments that find a poor
comprehender difference is that the task is within the verbal domain. For example,
Pimperton and Nation (2010) found that poor comprehenders showed more interfer-
ence in working memory, but only for verbal materials; when the task switched to the
visuo-spatial domain, the poor comprehenders were indistinguishable from their peers.
This is consistent with underlying language weaknesses influencing performance on any
task that places demands on those linguistic resources—including, of course, reading
comprehension. Further research is needed to unpack global constructs such as “reading
comprehension”and “linguistic comprehension”, not least in order to guide effective
teaching and intervention in the classroom.
Assessment and intervention for poor comprehenders
The Simple View has been influential in highlighting the existence of the poor compre-
hender profile, and the need to identify appropriate approaches to assessment and
intervention. It is clear that the ability to read words accurately and fluently—while critical
for adequate comprehension—is no guarantee that adequate reading comprehension will
follow. In turn, this means that a thorough assessment of reading should also include
a measure of text comprehension. This is not, however, a straightforward matter. Reading
64 K. NATION

comprehension tests vary. Some are heavily dependent on a child’s word reading; others
are so dependent on background knowledge that the questions can be answered quite
well without actually reading the passage (Keenan & Meenan, 2014).Thesametestcan
also tap different component skills, depending on the performance level achieved by
a child (Hua & Keenan, 2017). Knowledge effects are impossible to avoid—comprehension
is a reflection of our knowledge and for all of us, reading comprehension is more difficult
when topic knowledge is low. The message here is that we need to be mindful of the
nature of the test being used, and appreciate that test performance depends not only on
the child’s knowledge and abilities, but also the features of the text (a point that holds for
all children, not just poor comprehenders). The poor comprehender literature also has
implications for the need to assess children’s oral language (beyond phonological skills) as
part of any thorough assessment of reading.
One approach to intervention is to address a particular component of reading
comprehension, for example, vocabulary, inference making, or comprehension monitor-
ing. Such intervention studies have generally been with poor decoders, or children who
find both word reading and comprehension difficult, rather than with poor comprehen-
ders specifically. While gains are made on what has been taught, transfer effects to non-
trained components or on standardised measures of reading comprehension are small
(Elleman, 2017; Elleman, Lindo, Morphy, & Compton, 2009). This is perhaps not surpris-
ing, given the complex nature of reading comprehension, and its dependence on strong
content knowledge. That said, there are excellent examples of promising approaches to
teaching reading comprehension (for review, see Oakhill, Cain, & Elbro, 2014) that could
be developed and trialled for children identified as poor comprehenders.
Adifferent approach is to consider the fundamental role of oral language (or
linguistic comprehension, in terms of the Simple View) in reading comprehension and
aim intensive intervention there. Working from the finding that poor comprehenders
have impairments in linguistic comprehension, Clarke, Snowling, Truelove, and Hulme
(2010) developed a language intervention that directly and explicitly worked on
8–9 year-olds’oral language with direct instruction tapping vocabulary, grammar and
narrative. Using a randomised controlled design, they compared this 20-week interven-
tion with one focussing on text comprehension itself, and a combined approach
targeting both oral language and text comprehension. Intervention was delivered in
small groups by trained teaching assistants, with three 30-minute sessions per week.
Pleasingly, all three groups improved in reading comprehension relative to a waiting list
control group. Those receiving oral language training showed most improvement in
reading comprehension 11 months later, and improvements in reading comprehension
were predicted by improvements in vocabulary. Fricke et al. (2013) used a similar
approach but with materials designed for much younger children. They identified
children with low language at around the time of school entry. Those who received
an intensive language intervention showed improvements in oral language, and got off
to a better start with reading comprehension than children in the control group. These
findings are encouraging, and support the rationale for improving children’s oral lan-
guage as the basis for bringing about improvements in reading comprehension. Note
however these interventions are intensive, and are designed to be delivered by teaching
assistants who have been specifically trained—quick fixes are not to be expected.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 65

Part IV: reflections on the Simple View
In the 30-plus years since the Simple View was first articulated by Gough and Tunmer
(1986), its elegance and force in describing the essence of reading comprehension has
become clear. By setting out decoding and linguistic comprehension as separate but
interacting components, it reminds us that reading comprehension requires both the
ability to identify individual words, and the ability to construct meaning from text. When
assessed reliably using comprehensive measures, how good children are at decoding
and linguistic comprehension predicts how good they are at reading comprehension
extraordinarily well. The Simple View provides a framework for classifying reading
difficulties, and it has done much to promote our understanding of the relationship
between spoken language and reading development. It is not just children with “classic
dyslexia”who need extra support in the classroom: research conducted within the
Simple View framework has shown that a large proportion of children with low word
reading also show poor oral language, as do children with reading comprehension
impairments. These research findings have important implications for assessment and
intervention and it is a positive development to see materials written for practitioners
framed within the Simple View (e.g. Stuart & Stainthorp, 2015).
Despite these strengths, the Simple View has led to some false impressions. As noted
earlier, the Simple View “does not deny the complexity of reading, but asserts that such
complexities are restricted to either of the two components”, linguistic comprehension
and decoding (Hoover & Gough, 1990, p. 150). Nevertheless, Catts (2018) discusses how
visualisations of the Simple View—diagrams like Figure 1, with the two components
appearing to be the same size—have inadvertently camouflaged the complexity of
reading comprehension and in doing, created false impressions about its malleability,
and the extent to which it can be captured by a score on an omnibus test. These
concerns intersect with some of our earlier discussion—that the Simple View is not
a model of what needs to develop to bring about change in either of the two
components. In terms of partitioning and explaining variance, it is clear that the relative
weighting of the two constructs changes over time, with linguistic comprehension
becoming more closely associated with reading comprehension as decoding skills
strengthen (e.g., Language and Reading Research Consortium, 2015). Early on, the
decoding component predominates, but beyond the early stages of learning to read,
the linguistic comprehension oval in diagrams like Figure 1 needs to be much bigger,
and have more indicators feeding into it, reflecting its multifaceted nature.
Another false impression is that the two components are entirely separable. A good deal
of variation in reading comprehension is shared between the two components. Lonigan
et al. (2018) suggested that this common variance might be related to some underlying
general cognitive linguistic ability, and in their analyses, shared variance predicted differ-
ences in reading comprehension beyond the unique variance associated with each compo-
nent. Consistent with this, longitudinal data have shown that some factors predict multiple
components of reading. As noted earlier for example, Hulme et al. (2015) found that
language skills at 3.5 years contributed to decoding at 5.5 years as well as reading
comprehension at 8.5 years. Similarly, there is no doubt that oral vocabulary is a vital
component of linguistic comprehension, nor that it is closely associated with reading
comprehension. This does not mean it is irrelevant for word reading. On the contrary,
66 K. NATION

vocabulary is also associated with word reading, both in typical development and atypical
development (e.g., Nation & Snowling, 1998; Taylor, Duff, Woollams, Monaghan, & Ricketts,
2015). Consider too the importance of morphology. Numerous studies have found associa-
tions between children’s reading comprehension and their knowledge and appreciation of
morphology (e.g., Levesque, Kieffer, & Deacon, 2019; Tong, Deacon, Kirby, Cain, & Parrila,
2011), consistent with morphology being a critical component of linguistic comprehension.
At the same time, however, skilled word recognition is highly sensitive to morphological
regularities that are marked in the orthography, reminding us that English is
a morphophonemic in nature (Rastle, 2019; Venezky, 1999). As reading develops, the
word recognition system comes to embody this structure and this is reflected in how single
words are read and processed (e.g., Dawson, Rastle, & Ricketts, 2018; Kearns & Al Ghanem, in
press). Thus, morphological knowledge is not onlypart of linguistic comprehension. It is also
core to word recognition and its development—that is, what is captured within the Simple
View as “decoding”.
What are the implications of these findings for the Simple View? To take development
on board, it might be that our visual representation needs to be more complex, with
some underlying language factor feeding into both components, and/or bi-directional
connections between decoding and linguistic comprehension, as shown in Figure 7.
This figure also shows feedback arrows from reading comprehension into language.
This is to remind us of the importance of reading experience. It is the substrate from
which basic decoding skills develop and automatise (see Castles et al., 2018). It also
provides rich and varied opportunities for language learning, as children encounter new
vocabulary and new syntactic structures via reading (Montag & MacDonald, 2015;
Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015). The implication of this for children with reading difficul-
ties is neatly captured by Stanovich’s(1986) description of the Matthew effect—the
richer get richer and the poor get poorer. Low levels of spoken language set the scene
for reading difficulties, which in turn lead to greater differences in spoken language,
relative to peers who read well. Or, in the words of Snow (2016), “language is literacy is
language”.
The Simple View provides a useful framework for thinking about reading comprehen-
sion and its development. It positions decoding as central to learning to read and
reminds us that no amount of oral language prowess can bring about successful
Figure 7. An expanded view of the Simple View of reading.
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 67

reading, if a child has not learned the principles of how their writing system works. This
is what learning to read is about, and what needs to be taught at the outset. Getting
better at reading words, and developing all that is needed to serve reading comprehen-
sion in all its infinite varieties, obviously demands more than decent decoding: the
knowledge and processing skills nested within linguistic comprehension are fundamen-
tal. There is no doubt that the Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension.
But we also need to look beyond the Simple View, if we are to understand more about
how subcomponent processes work and develop, and how they can be optimised in the
classroom and the clinic by well-designed reading and language instruction.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Learning Difficulties Australia for the opportunity to discuss some of the work
described in this paper in person. Its content has been shaped by the many interesting and lively
discussions that ensued. Particular thanks to Anne Castles, Robyn Wheldall, Kevin Wheldall and
Bartek Rajkowski for their wisdom and generous hospitality, and to Pye Twaddell, Tanya Serry and
members of the LDA Committee for making it all possible. Thanks too to my collaborators on the
Learning to Read Project: Dorothy Bishop, Joanne Cocksey, Jo Taylor and Philip Angell, to Anne
Castles, Nicola Dawson, Tiffany Hogan, Tanya Serry and Maggie Snowling for constructive feed-
back, and Alexander Wilson for editorial assistance. This research was supported by the Economic
and Social Research Council, grants ES/M009998/1 and RES-000-23-0581.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, grants ES/M009998/1
and RES-000-23-0581.
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