Successful reading comprehension demands complex cognitive skills, and, consequently, motivation to make meaning from text. Research on reading motivation and engagement can inform policy aimed at improving reading achievement. Multiple dimensions of reading motivation and engagement—and instructional practices for bolstering each one—draw on interventions for students of diverse language and ethnic backgrounds in elementary and middle grade classrooms. The article concludes with policy recommendations centering on (a) the need for school administrators and teachers to learn principles of reading motivation and engagement and (b) the importance of devoting time to planning, in collaboration with researchers, how to apply these principles with particular students in particular classrooms.

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The simple view of reading describes reading as the product of decoding (D) and listening comprehension (LC). However, the simple view of reading has been challenged, and evidence has proved it to be too simple to explain the complexities of reading comprehension in the elementary school years. Hypotheses have been advanced that there are cognitive-linguistic factors that underlie the common variance between D and LC, which are malleable, although there is no clarity at this point regarding what these are. We propose that one such group of malleable cognitive factors is executive function (EF) skills. Further, we posit that EF skills play equally strong roles in explaining reading comprehension variance in emergent bilinguals and English monolinguals. We used multigroup structural equation modeling to determine the contribution of these constructs (D, LC, and EF) to reading comprehension in 425 emergent bilinguals and 302 English monolinguals in grades 2-4. The shared variance between D and LC was explained by direct and indirect effects in the models tested, with strong indirect effects for the EFs of cognitive flexibility and working memory through D and LC, respectively, for both language groups. The indirect effect of cognitive flexibility through LC on reading comprehension was considerably larger for emergent bilinguals than for English monolinguals. Considerations for a more nuanced view of the simple view of reading and its implications for practice are discussed. P ublic discourse surrounding the science of reading has emphasized the simple view of reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986) as a guiding framework for research under the Reading for Understanding initiative in the last decade (e.g.,

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