Journal of Literacy Research

The Simple View of Reading, as originally articulated by Gough and Tunmer (1986), proposes that reading comprehension ability can be predicted by the product term of two components: decoding and listening comprehension (R = D × L). Based on a longitudinal study evaluating developmental reading in bilingual children, Hoover and Gough (1990) reported results providing initial support for the model. The present study attempted to cross-validate the Simple View of Reading using a sample of children with English as their first language. Results support the idea that reading comprehension ability can be decomposed into decoding and listening comprehension abilities, but they do not support the assumption that all or most of the substantive variance in reading comprehension can be explained by the multiplicative combination of decoding and listening comprehension. They do, however, support a more complicated version of the model, which requires the inclusion of both the linear and the product terms in predicting reading comprehension from decoding and language comprehension (R = D + L + D × L).

The case study of a Norwegian deaf boy with severe reading disorder is described. In spite of average and above-average performance on standardized tests, adequate motivation, and the fact that the reading instruction was adapted to the signing environment of the deaf students, on entering the 5th grade at 11 years of age, the boy was functionally illiterate. A holistic approach to writing instruction was initiated, based on process-oriented writing, Norwegian sign language, drawings, and word processing augmented with a word prediction system called PAL. This approach managed to get writing within his zone of proximal development, that is, it made it possible to provide him with writing assignments that he could learn to complete. With appropriate help and guidance from the teachers, the student himself actively acquired reading and writing skills, which he now uses independently for schoolwork and self-initiated writing activities, as well for as reading newspapers and closed-captioned television programs.

This study investigated the reading of policy documents by Dutch legislators. Its first aim was to investigate reading-to-assess processes using methods that address the limitations of previous studies. Its second aim was to analyze the reading-to-assess processes of the legislators to extend existing models and theories of reading in professional contexts. Data were gathered from 8 Dutch legislators who thought aloud while reading a policy document. Three methods of data analysis were employed: analyses of information-seeking behaviors, cognitive processes, and reading goals. Results indicated that the legislators read efficiently, focusing on relatively small portions of the policy documents in a nonlinear fashion, and that their processing of the text was devoted to elaborating and evaluating in relation to their goals for reading. Findings are discussed in relation to existing models of reading texts in professional life.

This study focused on us — a group of university — and school-based teacher researchers and observers — as we attempted to alter or interrupt certain gendered discursive practices that threatened to reproduce some of the same inequities in classroom talk about texts that we had noted in the past, but had not challenged. A feminist theoretical framework guided our use of gender as a lens for examining how particular power relations operating in our classrooms governed how students interacted in their discussions of assigned subject-matter texts. Fieldnotes, transcripts of videotaped text-based discussions, and interviews with students were collected in a graduate-level content-literacy class, a 7th-grade language arts class, and an 8th-grade language arts class. Transcripts of weekly research meetings and narrative vignettes that summarized a series of observations and interviews resulted in multiple layers of data. The findings reported from analyzing these data focus on 4 types of interactions: self-deprecating, discriminatory, and exclusionary talk; and talk that reflected our desire for teacher neutrality. Narrative analyses were used to reveal the difficulties we encountered in understanding and interpreting gendered discursive practices and the insights we gained from studying ourselves.