The Simple View is, at one level, the observation that at the onset of reading instruction, a child knows spoken language (at the level of a 5 or 6 year old) and needs to learn how to use the spellings of words to access knowledge of them gained from using oral language. Reading thus involves print, language, and the connections between them. This aspect of the Simple View accurately describes conditions at the onset of reading. The beginning reader’s initial challenge is indeed to learn how print represents words that are known from spoken language. This observation is consistent with countless studies because it describes the basic problem of beginning to read. It could be falsified only if we discovered a culture in which children learn to read before they learn to talk, or we found that children ignore what they already know about language in learning about print, or equally fanciful events obtained. I will call this the Simple Point of the Simple View. Every account of reading must include both print and language in some manner given that the minimal definition of reading is “comprehending language in written form.” This point is useful for a teacher or other educator coping with colleagues who maintain that instruction about the associations between print and sound–phonics–is unimportant, an impediment to skilled reading, or only relevant for struggling readers.[2]
Discussions of the Simple View frequently note that it is supported by a hundred or more studies as a way to establish its validity and also convey the depth of reading research. To take two examples, according to the Reading League’s guide to the science of reading, “The Simple View of Reading has been empirically validated by over 150 scientific studies.” According to a Reading Rockets blog, “The Simple View is supported by hundreds of studies which have shown decoding and language comprehension are critical to skilled reading.” What these studies support is the Simple Point.