Studying Text Difficulty through Miscue Analysis. Program in Language and Literacy. Occasional Paper Number 3

As part of a larger study of the oral reading of elementary school students representing eight linguistic populations in the United States, a study was conducted to discover why readers make the same miscues at the same point in a text and to discover factors in the text that contribute to this phen...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors Altwerger, Bess, Goodman, Kenneth S
Format Report
LanguageEnglish
Published 01.06.1981
Subjects
Cognitive Processes
Cross Cultural Studies
Elementary Education
Error Analysis (Language)
Interaction Process Analysis
Interference (Language)
Miscue Analysis
Prose Learning
Reading Comprehension
Reading Difficulties
Reading Processes
Reading Research
Structural Analysis (Linguistics)
Syntax
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Summary:As part of a larger study of the oral reading of elementary school students representing eight linguistic populations in the United States, a study was conducted to discover why readers make the same miscues at the same point in a text and to discover factors in the text that contribute to this phenomenon. Subjects were second, fourth, and sixth grade students who were Navajo, Hawaiian Samoan, Arab, and Texas Spanish second language speakers, as well as downeast Maine, Appalachian white, Mississippi rural black, and Hawaiian-pidgin dialect speakers. They were instructed to read aloud whole stories of considerable length and to recall all they could remember about the stories. Sentences that generated the highest rates of miscues per word per reader were then analyzed for aspects that contributed to those rates. The analysis confirmed that syntactic complexity was not the only contributor to miscues. Other factors causing miscues were (1) lack of relevant prior knowledge, (2) unfamiliar or unusual use of terminology, (3) weak syntax, (4) unpredictable simple structures, (5) unusual stylized syntax, (6) complex syntax, and (7) combinations of the above. The findings suggest that text difficulty cannot be understood completely without some investigation of the interaction between readers and the text, and that miscue analysis can provide data that reveal such interaction. (FL)