Different Techniques in Miscue Analysis

sat behind the students, out of their direct view, thus not distracting their attention from the teacher and the task.

Three of the seven teacher interviews were conducted in the staff room of the school the respondents were teaching at, in two cases the place was a vacant classroom in the school, one respondent was interviewed in her home, and one teacher was interviewed in a local café where there was some background music, but which did not disturb the recording of the interview. All the seven interviews went smoothly; they were not interrupted by disturbing factors. Time spent on the interviews ranged between 20 minutes to one hour. All of them were conducted in Hungarian.

Two educational manager interviews were recorded in the office of the subjects, while the third one was done in the home of the participant as the only possible solution for lack of time and place. All the three ladies were willing to participate in the study and were extremely helpful. The interviews lasted from 25 to 46 minutes.

Korean in Rha, 2002—therefore they might be of interest in the present study, because the participants of this research were non-native English speakers, too.

There have been attempts to alter the Goodman Taxonomy and the process of miscue analysis the result of which was a diagnostic method called the Modified Miscue Analysis (2000). This procedure was believed to be “valuable for teachers wanting to find out more about students who seem to have trouble gaining meaning from print” (Modified Miscue Analysis, 2000). The technique considers that miscues can be of six types: substitution, insertion, omission, repetition, correction, and reversal. Unlike the original taxonomy of Goodman, it deals with repetition and correction as two different types, whereas in the taxonomy these were united in one type called ‘regression’ (Goodman & Burke, 1973), used for print that was repeated and either corrected or not. The technique analyses miscues by seeking answers to the following eight questions:

a) To what extent does the OR look like the ER?

b) To what extent does the OR sound like the ER?

c) What is the grammatical function of the OR and the ER?

d) Is the OR grammatically acceptable within the text?

e) Does the OR produce a structure that is acceptable in terms of meaning?

f) To what extent does the miscue change the intended text meaning?

g) Is a different intonation pattern involved?

h) Is the reader’s dialect involved in the miscue? (Modified Miscue Analysis, 2000).

All of the above eight questions correspond to the eighteen categories in the Goodman Taxonomy, e.g. questions a) and b) equal to categories 3 and 4—graphic and phonemic proximity, questions d) and e) coincide with categories 6 and 7—syntactic and semantic acceptability, etc. The technique also distinguishes between high quality and low quality miscues. High quality miscues indicate that the reader is reading for meaning, it includes miscues like familiar language, e.g. contractions instead of full forms, dialect, self-correction, and omissions. Low quality miscues show that the reader is insecure in reading and may not be deriving meaning from the text being read. These miscues include omissions, frequent self-corrections, and reversal/omission/addition of letters.

In the past few years, some new systems appeared on the Internet, providing English teachers with valuable pieces of advice on how to create so-called running records of a child’s reading in English as their native language or English as their second language. These are generally used for assessing a child’s ability to read in English. During the process of

assessment, the learner reads aloud a passage from a book that corresponds to their level of interest, cognitive development, and linguistic difficulty—but with which the child was not familiar previously—while the teacher records the learner’s reading behaviour, i.e. all the deviations or miscues that occur in the child’s reading. It is said that through analysing the results of running records the teacher can gain insights into a child’s reading and get information about their particular reading difficulty, and also, ideas about how to best help the child. With the help of running records, the teacher can learn whether the child can use semantic, syntactic, and phonographic cues (or ‘graphophonic’, as Goodman (1970) puts it).

If the learner cannot use these cues properly, the teacher needs to teach some strategies to them in order to be able to derive meaning from the text they have read. These strategies include paired or shared reading followed by discussion about the text’s meaning—in case the learner cannot make use of semantic cues in the text, prediction exercises and cloze procedures—in case the learner cannot make use of syntactic cues in the text, using questions that direct the pupil to looking at the text, e.g. ‘What does the word begin with?’, or ‘Can you see any smaller words you recognize?’—in case the learner cannot make use of graphophonic cues in the text. Running records single out seven types of miscues: refusal—when the learner does not read the word or any part of it—indicated by _ _ _ _ _ _ _; self-correction, indicated by the word ‘error’ written above the miscue and then ‘SC’ for ‘self-corrected’; omission, indicated by a circle drawn round the word which was omitted; insertion, indicated by a caret in the place of insertion above which the inserted word is written by the teacher; hesitation, indicated by the letter ‘H’ or a slash; reversal, indicated by the letter ‘S’ on its side; and substitution, indicated by the misread word crossed out and the substituted word written above it.

Based on the different methods and techniques applied in miscue analysis, a new system was developed for the purposes of the present study, which is described in the following section.