The Peter Effect ( Applegate & Applegate, 2004 Applegate, A. J. and Applegate, M. D. 2004. The Peter Effect: Reading habits and attitudes of teacher candidates. The Reading Teacher, 57: 554–563. [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ) claimed that one cannot be expected to give what one does not possess. We applied this notion to reading teacher preparation and hypothesized that teacher educators who do not possess an understanding of basic language constructs would not prepare teacher candidates with an understanding of these constructs considered essential for early reading success. Results from a survey of basic language constructs revealed similar patterns in performance between teacher educators and their respective teacher candidates, which served as initial validation of the Peter Effect in reading teacher preparation.

Whether the simple view of reading (SVR) as incorporated in the componential model of reading (CMR) is applicable to other orthographies than English was explored in this study. Spanish, with transparent orthography and Chinese, with opaque orthography were selected because of their diverse characteristics. The first part reports a study of students from grades 2 and 3, whose home language and medium of instruction was Spanish, and were administered tests of decoding, listening, and reading comprehension. A comparison group of 49 children from Grade 2, 54 children from Grade 3, and 55 children from Grade 4, whose home language and instruction was English, were also administered tests of decoding, listening, and reading comprehension. Multiple regression analysis showed that approximately 60% of the variance in reading comprehension of Spanish participants and 50% of the variance in reading comprehension of English participants were explained by decoding and listening comprehension. Furthermore, the performance of third grade Spanish participants resembled that of fourth grade English-speaking participants. In the second study, 102 Chinese students from Grade 2 and 106 students from Grade 4 were administered tasks of Chinese character recognition, reading fluency, listening, and reading comprehension. Multiple regression analyses showed character recognition and listening comprehension accounted for 25% and 42% of the variance in Chinese reading comprehension at Grades 2 and 4 respectively. These results indicate that the simple view of reading is applicable to writing systems other than that of English.

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) in Hebrew was tested by administering decoding, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension measures to 1,002 students from Grades 2 to 10 in the northern part of Israel. Results from hierarchical regression analyses supported the SVR in Hebrew with decoding and listening comprehension measures explaining much of the variance in reading comprehension. Further, commonality analyses showed that decoding and listening comprehension contributed differently at different grade levels with decoding generally contributing more at the early grade levels and listening comprehension contributing more at the higher grade levels, which is observed in other alphabetic languages as well. However, unlike in transparent orthographies, such as Spanish and Finnish, decoding seems to play an important role in reading comprehension for a longer period due to the nature of Hebrew orthography of using unpointed script after the fourth-grade level.