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Scarborough's Reading Rope, explained.
Scarborough's Reading Rope is a picture of everything that weaves together into skilled reading. Drawn by researcher Hollis Scarborough in 2001, it shows two groups of strands, word recognition and language comprehension, twisting tighter over time until reading becomes accurate and automatic. It pairs naturally with the Simple View of Reading, filling in the strands inside each half.
Two groups of strands
The rope has a lower group, word recognition, and an upper group, language comprehension. Skilled reading is both groups woven together. A weakness in either shows up as a reading problem, which is the same message as the Simple View of Reading.
The word-recognition strands
These are the strands that turn print into words: awareness of the individual sounds in words, decoding those sounds to spellings, and building a store of words a reader recognizes instantly. Structured literacy spends its early energy here, because these strands become automatic with the right practice. This is the work behind our scope and sequence and the six syllable types.
The language-comprehension strands
These are the strands that make words meaningful: background knowledge, vocabulary, understanding of how sentences work, verbal reasoning, and a sense of how books and stories go. They grow through wide reading, being read to, and talk, from a child's earliest years.
How the strands weave
Early on, each strand is separate and takes attention. With practice the word-recognition strands become automatic and the language strands grow richer, and the two groups twist into a single strong rope: fluent reading that frees the mind for meaning. That weaving together is what fluency and comprehension work are building toward.
Source: Scarborough's Reading Rope, Hollis Scarborough (2001); overview at Reading Rockets.
See it in action. In the Lillory app, the word-recognition strands, sound awareness, decoding and instant word recognition, are taught directly and practiced until they are automatic.