ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concept of Mental Models as representations of text and the Simple View of Reading and the distinction between word reading and language comprehension. It explains the relation between word reading and reading comprehension and distinguishes between poor word readers and poor comprehenders. Reading comprehension is important, not just for understanding text, but for broader learning, success in education, and employment. It is even important for our social lives, because of email, text, and social networking sites. Reading comprehension is a complex task, which requires the orchestration of many different cognitive skills and abilities. is helpful to distinguish between two main components in reading: word decoding and language comprehension. Word reading refers to the ability to read single words out of context. Language comprehension refers to our ability to understand words, sentences, and text. These are the two key components in The Simple View of Reading.
