What is the Science of Reading?
- Ashley Oswald
- Nov 30, 2025
- 3 min read
It’s clear that students with higher needs belong in French Immersion. But, it is also clear that reading difficulties tend to be an important reason that students leave the program. This is no surprise, as reading is “arguably the most essential skill for success in all educational contexts” and remains “of paramount importance”. Naturally, parents and teachers worry when their children or students are struggling to learn how to read.
This brings us to the question: How can we help all students become successful readers in French Immersion? The answer is found in the Science of Reading. The Science of Reading is essentially is a vast collection of academic research from various fields such as developmental psychology, linguistics, and language acquisition.
A wide breadth of research shows that there are several essential early literacy skills that readers must develop and master to become competent readers. Thankfully, this same research shows that these same early literacy skills can be improved with instruction, both immediately and with long-term effects.
Foundational Early Literacy Skills
Research consistently identifies five key skills as reliable predictors of reading success, and it is critical for educators to understand what these important skills are.
Early "word recognition" abilities (such as letter identification and phonological awareness) are particularly strong indicators, while verbal abilities related to "comprehension”, (including vocabulary, sentence/story recall, and concepts of print) also play a significant role.
We will delve more into these 5 foundational skills in a separate blog post, entitled "The Big 5". But first, let's look at where their acceptance as foundational skills came from.
The Simple View & The Reading Rope
Word Recognition and Comprehension form the two main components in both the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough's Reading Rope.
The Simple View of Reading (SVR) was developed by psychologists Philip Gough and William Tunmer in 1986, and posits that reading comprehension results from the interaction between word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Essentially, their formula is:
D (decoding) x LC (language comprehension) = RC (Reading Comprehension)
Scarborough's Reading Rope expanded on the SVR in 2001 by illustrating how skilled reading is the result of intertwining threads of language comprehension (e.g., background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax) and word recognition (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition).
These models were some of the first to acknowledge the absolutely critical role of Word Recognition, and are popular today in workshops about the Science of Reading.
Beyond the Simple View & the Reading Rope
However, research did not stop in 2001. There is much more to the Science of Reading than the Simple View and the Reading Rope. Newer models and frameworks continue to deepen our understanding of:
How different foundational skills interact
How motivation, identity, and background knowledge influence reading
How to support multilingual and French Immersion learners specifically
How instruction can be structured to support all readers, including those with learning differences
In other words, the Simple View and the Reading Rope gave us a powerful starting point—but they are not the whole story.
What’s Coming Next in the “Reading Research” Series
This post is just the beginning of the “Reading Research” series on the Growing Great Readers Blog. In upcoming posts, we’ll explore:
The Big 5 foundational reading skills in more detail
Other key skills and processes that support literacy development
How all of these pieces fit together in French Immersion classrooms
Practical strategies and examples you can use with your students
There is so much more to learn about how children learn to read—and how we can better support them, especially in French Immersion. Follow along with the “Reading Research” series to keep learning, one post at a time.
Want to stay up to date with new blog posts? Subscribe to emails here.
SOURCES
H. Douglas Brown and Priyanvada Abeywickrama, Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices, 3rd ed. (Pearson Education, 2019).
Acadience Learning, Acadience Reading ALO Assessment Manual, 2020, https://acadiencelearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/AcadienceReading_ALO_Assessment_Manual.pdf.F
National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).
Can Scarborough’s Reading Rope Transform the Approach to Literacy Instruction?,” Really Great Reading, accessed April 6, 2025, https://www.reallygreatreading.com/blog/scarboroughs-reading-rope?srsltid=AfmBOopOBfy3OPrdo9Gvq50zabEeH25pcvjl85Kp8xhf7yEEuyDClatZ.
“Models of Reading,” Reading Rockets, accessed April 5, 2025,
Comments