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

The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986 Gough, P. B. and Tunmer, W. E. 1986. Decoding, reading, and reading disability. RASE: Remedial and Special Education, 7: 6–10. Crossref] , Google Scholar]) 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.