Evaluation of the Simple View of Reading in an EFL Context: An Additive or Product Model?

Abstract

This study attempted to find the relationship among decoding skill (DS), reading comprehension (RC) and listening comprehension (LC) in an EFL context to evaluate Gough and Tunmer's (1986) Simple View of Reading (SVR) in which Reading Comprehension = Decoding x Listening Comprehension. To this end, 85 female students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) at a Language Institute in Shiraz were asked to participate in the study. The sample was homogenous with regard to their English level. Through a multiple-choice cloze test, multiple-choice listening test and a word and non-word reading assessment, RC, LC and DS were measured respectively. To find out if reading comprehension equals DS x LC, correlation analysis and simple linear regression analysis were used. The results supported the validity of the simple view of reading