Background to the instruments used to identify the miscue variables

The analysis of miscues in reading began with the studies of Kenneth Goodman who saw reading as a language process and also a psycholinguistic process as "there is an essential interaction between language and thought in reading" (Goodman, 1978), with readers focussing on constructing meaning. This means that "the reader, a language user, reconstructs as best he can a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display"

(Gollasch, 1982).

In doing this two things are involved for the reader. Firstly, if the primary aim is to get to the meaning of what has been read, the reader will be using a certain set of strategies. These strategies are listed by Goodman as those of sampling, predicting, confirming and correcting (Gollasch, 1982). A reader will use sampling strategies to review the visual input on the page, prediction strategies to anticipate what will come next, confirmation strategies to verify the word is correct and lastly correction strategies to correct an error of which the reader becomes aware during reading. In using these strategies, the more proficient reader may change words round, use synonyms and omit words, but ultimately meaning will be retained. The reader will simply be reprocessing the text into his own words. Secondly through the reading miscues made, the reader will be demonstrating the extent of his/her linguistic knowledge. Readers will use graphic information, that is visual input from the print, along with syntactic and semantic knowledge to comprehend what is being read. Goodman and Goodman (1977) state that "all three systems are used in an integrated fashion." The

more proficient readers will be using all their available linguistic knowledge to reach meaning as economically as possible. In fact "the child concentrates his total prior experience and learning on the task, drawing on his experiences and the concepts he has attained as well as the language competence he has achieved."

In the 1970s, Goodman extended the knowledge gained from his previous research to "Americans who speak a language other than English before entering school" (1978). He wished to gain an insight into how learners became literate in a second language, by providing an in-depth description of reading among speakers of English as a second language. He felt there might be some differential in predicting syntactic patterns and in control over concepts. There might also be greater dependency on graphophonic cueing for the second language learner, to compen­ sate for any lack of control over syntactic patterns and concepts. If children interact with what they see on the printed page, optimise their graphophonic, syntactic and semantic knowledge in order to construct meaning with the minimum of effort, then this is likely to be done more readily when reading in a first than in a second language. When reading in a second language, children may have less facility with processing syntactical structures and concepts. Much will ultimately depend on their familiarity with the second language and whether or not they have previously encountered the concepts used in the text.

Throughout his work, Goodman emphasised the usefulness of the system of miscue analysis in the classroom. He indicated that

nthis knowledge can form the basis for more effective reading instruction" (Gollasch, 1982). Any miscues made will be diagnostically useful for the class teacher as they will help to indicate the extent to which children are using graphophonic, syntactic and semantic knowledge. Teachers can then identify areas where children need help to become more effective readers. This can best be done by identifying the acceptability or unacceptability of an error in reading. If the error is acceptable and there is no change in the meaning of the text, then it is of little importance in any diagnosis. If the error is unacceptable, then a useful analysis might reveal a linguistic cause. The reader may then benefit from further instruction.

Biemuller (1970), tracing the reading development of six to seven year olds, also concluded that "miscue analysis was a powerful diagnostic tool for the assessment of reading". Having isolated the stages that children pass through when learning to read, he suggested that slower readers overuse graphic informa­ tion. Pumfrey (1977) also suggested that miscue analysis might be used as an indication of progress in reading. Southgate et al (1982) found that "mature reading involves sampling of the text on three levels of language, graphophonic, syntactic and semantic" and that "the reader will use the expectations of the text to achieve understanding as economically as possible."

Except for Ellis (1980), who analysed the reading miscues of twelve Asian children aged 7.2 to 11.2 years with a reading age of 7.4 to 8.5 years, there appears to be no analysis of the

reading miscues of bilingual children in Britain. It was against this background of prior work into the miscues the children make when reading that the instruments for the study were selected. The following section is concerned with the identification of the stories that the children read.