The Stanovich Model

Keith Stanovich’s ‘Interactive-Compensatory Model’ of the reading process(1984) is now more widely accepted among reading researchers than Goodman’s model. Stanovich points out that reading involves a number of interactions withthe text. One of the most important of these is the reader’s allocation of‘processing capacity’ to the text. Fluent readers need less processing capacity for word recognition, freeing more capacity for comprehension. If there are problems with word recognition, more resources are allocated to that part of the reading process, at the expense of some of the capacity for comprehension.