Expanding the Simple View of Reading in Accounting for Reading Skills in Community College Students

Abstract

The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that listening comprehension and decoding, properly measured, can account for all of the variance in reading comprehension. We assessed the simple view in community college students. In addition to listening comprehension and decoding, we included measures of oral vocabulary, nonverbal reasoning, phonological awareness, reading fluency, and verbal working memory. In combination, the measures yielded an R² of.48, but only listening comprehension and reading fluency made independent contributions to reading comprehension. Predictors that best distinguished less skilled from average readers were phonological awareness and verbal working memory. These findings suggest a need to expand the simple view in accounting for individual differences among adult readers.

View correction statement:

Erratum

Acknowledgments

Research presented in this article was supported by a grant to Haskins Laboratories by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, HD 01994. Preparation of the manuscript was supported in part by NICHD grant HD 40353. We thank Jean Dietrich for her help in data collection and Eric Lundquist for his comments on an earlier draft.