Season 10, Episode 1

The (not so) Simple View of Reading, with Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.

In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Wesley Hoover, a psycholinguist at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss the Simple View of Reading and how it can serve as the basis for our understanding of comprehension. Wesley digs into all the complexities of this model—which is only simple at a high level—including the meaning of language comprehension vs. reading comprehension, the impact of word recognition, and using the simple view to identify struggling students. He’ll even address the limitations of the simple view of reading, untangle common misconceptions, and give you tools for assessing the value of any model for reading that you might encounter.

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Transcripts and additional resources:

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Listen to Science of Reading Essentials: Comprehension

Meet Our Guest(s):

Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.

Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.

Wesley A. Hoover is a psycholinguist with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He spent 35 years at Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL), where he researched the cognitive foundations of reading, and served as President and CEO for his last 18 years. He led the 2015 merger of SEDL with AIR, where he continued to work on literacy projects before retiring in 2019. He now works as a writer, speaker, and consultant on the cognitive foundations of reading.

Meet our host, Susan Lambert

Susan Lambert is Chief Academic Officer of Literacy at 含羞草视频 and host of Science of Reading: The Podcast. Throughout her career, she has focused on creating high-quality learning environments using evidence-based practices. Lambert is a mom of four, a grandma of four, a world traveler, and a collector of stories.

As the host of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Lambert explores the increasing body of scientific research around how reading is best taught. A former classroom teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer, she’s dedicated to turning theory into best practices that educators can put right to use in the classroom, and to showcasing national models of reading instruction excellence.

Person with short blonde hair, glasses, and earrings, wearing an orange jacket, smiling in front of a plain gray background—committed to literacy education and fostering background knowledge for all learners.

Quotes

“To be a reader, you have to be good at two things: word recognition and language comprehension. Both of them are necessary components of reading, but neither one of them is sufficient on its own.”

—Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.

“The simple view doesn't say that reading is not complex. It just says the complexity is housed in two factors, word recognition and language comprehension. And both of those are complex.”

—Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.

“If you're a teacher thinking about language comprehension, whatever time you devote to helping people understand language, if you can be effective in doing that, you'll never waste a kid's time.”

—Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.

“Language comprehension is unbounded. … The knowledge of the world and being able to express the knowledge of the world in language—that's always a key difficulty you work on for your entire life.”

—Wesley Hoover, Ph.D.