In 1986, Philip B. Gough and William E. Turner developed the Simple View of Reading model. The model explains the importance not only of teaching children to read but also of helping them connect with the reading through language comprehension. If a child can successfully decode the word “optimism” but has no idea what it means, the passage is still hard to understand. The Simple View of Reading states that Decoding x Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension. A solid Orton-Gillingham program not only focuses on how to decode (read) the words, but also on building a child’s vocabulary.

Fifteen years later, Dr. Hollis Scarborough developed a more advanced model, now known as Scarborough's Reading Rope. It takes into account additional skills that factor into reading comprehension, including phonological awareness and sight recognition as part of the decoding factor and background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge as part of the language comprehension factor. Looking at Scarborough’s Reading Rope, one can see that learning to read is not a simple concept.