Having just completed a miscue analysis of a first grade student I've been working with, I found myself reading an article about a miscue analysis. The article, What a teachers hears, what a student sees: Eye movements from a phonics-taught second grader (Brown, Kim, O'Brien Ramirez), really resonated with me given my just completed analysis.
The article starts out critiquing some pre-service and in-service teachers shallow understanding of the reading process, which include the idea that reading is the sequential decoding of symbols. This understanding, which is also based on research they say claims to be 'scientific', reduces reading to a mechanical process. It doesn't appreciate the techniques readers actually use.
The means by which this is addressed is a second grader's eye-movement and miscue analysis (EMMA.) Though, my miscue didn't include eye-movement detection - and few could - it did make for an interesting result. The passage the student, Ali, read said, "Once upon a time there was a woodman who thought that no one worked as hard as he did. One evening when he came home from work, he said to his wife, "what do you do all day while I'm away cutting wood?" On the second sentence, she made the miscues "on every, one - every, when e-, one every-t-, e(h)ery-(th)ing, every-(h)in," followed by 9 seconds of silence.
In total, she spent 22 seconds on this section of text. Based upon the miscue, one could (and many teachers who were shown the video do) imagine that she is not attended closely enough to the letters and that is why she persists in pronouncing a "r." However, the authors analysis shows that during the first 13 seconds, she was looking at the area of "One evening," but for the 9 seconds of silence her eyes were scanning "when he came home from work." Ultimately, she corrected herself based upon meaning and context. The authors go on to say that the girl seemed to anticipate, "on every" as making sense with the story thus far, whereas "one evening" is more akin to another story start. Thus, Ali, was not struggling with the phonics but rather with the meaning and her anticipation for what should come next. The authors suggest she may be making a miscue due to the inadequacies of the text.
Another miscue occurred in the dialogue of the woodman, with Ali saying, "What does - what do", self correcting quite quickly this time. One could imagine that Ali noticed that she did not look enough, and then self corrected based upon visual cues. In fact, Ali's eyes were on the next word "you" when she corrected - indicating that she self corrected according to structure and meaning. She understood "what does you" didn't sound correct.
There's more to this article and I think it's worth reading. They go on to suggest that teachers have more appreciation for comprehension in reading. A focus on phonics, or any singular system isn't the answer. Additionally, DIBELS makes another appearance, criticized for the test featuring non-sense words. A test that indicates to children that reading is decoding and making meaning and understanding is not the goal - clearly not the message we want to send. Even without the eye movement detection, from my own recent miscue analysis, much can be learned from them, and I appreciate learning more about them to further my understanding of the reading process.
Brown, J., Kim, K., & O'Brien Ramirez, K., (2012). What a teacher hears, what a reader
sees: Eye movements from a phonics-taught second grader. Journal of Early
Childhood Literacy. vol. 12 (2) 202-222.
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