Chapter 22

Chapter 22
“To Err is Human: Learning About Language Processes by Analyzing Miscues”

Yetta M. Goodman and Kenneth S. Goodman discuss the relevance of readers’ miscues. Goodman and Goodman analyze miscues as a way to examine a reader’s processing.
• Authors redefine ‘miscue’ as the unexpected responses by readers’ linguistic or conceptual cognitive responses. The actual analysis requires several conditions; material must be new to reader and the text must be long enough to produce enough miscues to determine if there is a ‘pattern’.
• The authors analyze an oral reading from ‘Betsy’. To summarize, she draws on her own background knowledge of language to make her reading ‘fit’ and make sense. Most of her miscues are calculated and not random. She predicts what she feels are appropriate structures and monitors to make sure her reading is making sense.
• Betsy reads not what her eyes see, but what makes sense to her brain. The authors explain it as text is what the brain responds to and the oral reading reflects the competence and psycho-sociolinguistic processes that have generated it. As Betsy reads, she sometimes predicts what the next sentence might say and may use substitution miscues that will fit with the meaning of the rest of the story. “The more proficient the reader, the greater the proportion of semantically acceptable miscues or miscues acceptable with the prior portion of the text that are self-corrected” (623) Many miscues that Betsy made were semantically correct. When a prediction did not fit, she would self-correct. An interesting phenomenon is when an author uses a pronoun to refer to a previously stated noun, a reader may revert to original noun and the reverse is true. If an author uses a noun for the referent that has been used, the reader may still use that pronoun. These kinds of miscues indicate that the reader is an active language user.
• The authors make a distinction between a reader comprehending, which is done during reading, and comprehension, which is the understanding after reading. They use open-ended retellings that provide an ‘insight’ of comprehension from the organization used, if they use their own words or the author’s words, and from the understandings or misunderstands they may gain from the reading. Schema plays a big part in the reader’s ability to make corrections or substitutions for the reading to make sense as in Betsy substituting ‘bread’ for ‘butter’. It is more common for people today to make ‘bread’ than to make their own ‘butter’. So her miscues are conceptually based and not an arbitrary confusion of the words.
• Teachers may also believe that reading is word recognition, so how can readers know a word in one context but not in another. The authors write that words that are in different syntactic and semantic contexts are different for readers. Betsy is confused with the phrase ‘keep(ing) house’ and struggles with it. As she works her way through, she reads ‘home’ and ‘house’ correctly, but struggles with ‘staying home’ and ‘keeping house’. She continues to work on it until she finally handles the structures by self-correcting or by reading a semantically acceptable sentence. As she interacts with the text, Betsy develops as a reader and is in the ‘zone of proximal development’ as she tries to make sense of the text.
• The authors continue in their discussion of reading as the processing of language and constructing meaning. A reader can manipulate language to understand a text that they cannot comprehend. They demonstrate this ‘Chomskyism’ by having readers read text with made-up or ‘non’ words and then answer questions. By knowing the structure of language, they can manipulate the text to correctly answer the questions or be able to give a sequenced retelling. A reader’s use of intonation is another indicator of being able to read non-word and text word.
• Grammatically, nouns are typically substituted for nouns, noun modifiers for noun modifiers, and function words substituted for function words. Readers will sometimes read past periods. They sometimes do this when they are trying to predict. Better readers self-correct and shift their intonation pattern whereas less-proficient readers do not correct.
• The authors continue with a discussion of schemata- linguistic schemata (rules of language); conceptual schemata (knowledge of the world); overarching schemata (creating new schemata and modifying old ones, schema for schema formation). The last schema is what allows us to create new sentences that have never been heard before and the ability of the listener to understand it. All the schemata must work in harmony and if there is an issue, a miscue occurs. Miscues can be viewed from two schema processes: schema-forming miscues reflect the developmental process of building the rule systems of language and concepts, and application of the rules (I’ll come and get you in a few whiles) and schema-driven miscues are the result from the use of existing schemata to produce or comprehend language (car headlamps being automatically read as car headlights). Piagetian concepts are discussed in regards to accommodation and assimilation. The processing may result in a ‘disequilibrium’ that may result in a self-correction.
• Finally, miscues should be viewed as positive. They explain or at least provide a view of:
o If a language user loses meaning…
o If a reader or listener interprets different from meaning intended by the speaker or author…
o If the language user chooses a syntactic schema different from the author’s…
o A reflection of readers’ ability to focus not on print but predict meaning
o Use linguistic and conceptual schemata to reverse, substitute, omit, paraphrase, etc.
o Reflect schemata and their level of confidence