Studying Text Difficulty through Miscue Analysis. Program in Language and Literacy. Occasional Paper Number 3 [electronic resource] / Bess Altwerger and Kenneth S. Goodman.
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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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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1981.
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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) |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Document Number: ED209657. Sponsoring Agency: National Inst. of Education (ED), Washington, DC. Sponsoring Agency: Office of Education (DHEW), Washington, DC. Educational level discussed: Elementary Education. |
| Physical Description: | 30 p. |