The results of a small-scale research into miscue analysis: a valuable diagnostic and formative tool to investigate children’s reading on a micro-level.
Miscue analysis, or running reading records, in the definition from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, is ‘an analytical procedure for assessing a learner’s reading comprehension, based on samples of oral reading. …learners’ mistakes when reading are not random errors, but actually their attempt to make sense of the text’ [my italics]. A miscue is where a structural cue within the word, a cue from the surrounding context or lack of concentration leads a reader to anticipate a word that does not actually occur. However, young readers will often self-correct when they realise that the word they have come up with does not make sense in the context. When young readers do not self-correct, it can lead to reinforcement of error, which underlines the importance of teaching them accurate word perception (Unit 4 of the OU Reading Development course, 1973).
Miscue analysis is useful to teachers because not only is it an illuminating record of how pupils tackle texts, offering a window into the mind, and a good way of identifying the level of their comprehension skills, but also a vital diagnostic tool for planning the most appropriate interventions to help achieve personalised learning. If pupils are made aware of the process they go through in the search for meaning, they can become more independent readers with a handful of strategies to call on (see my article on context cues on this website).
The present article is based on some miscue analysis I did in the 1970s with 23 pupils mainly aged six, with three texts at different levels from various reading schemes. This has been updated with information from the DCSF website which shows the procedure has not essentially changed, but there is much more focus on strategies. The work described makes heavy demands on time, but the neediest readers could be targeted. For groups of children, if someone other than the teacher could carry out a modified version, clear reading profiles would then be available to plan appropriate interventions, for example, reading for sense, identifying and correcting errors, and inferring unknown words from the surrounding text and confirming them with phonic and structural cues (the ‘guess and check’ procedure).
Miscue analysis or running reading records is less stressful than a test which only results in a reading age. The DCSF recommend that this process is carried out on a section of about 100 words from a text which the pupil may be reading. This can show ‘whether a text is at an appropriate level for that pupil [and] can provide information about the pupil’s particular difficulty and thus how best to help’. No special qualification is required to do a miscue analysis or ‘running reading record’, so this assessment can be done by teaching assistants, librarians, paired reading volunteers and parents, as well as teachers, but it is obviously important for them to have a good understanding of both the purposes and the techniques used and a supervised first run-through (see the end of this article for the procedure which is based on: www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/casestudies/isp/reading/1151505/1151399, Resource 5, Using running records).
When I did miscue analysis, I made a much fuller record of my own on a separate sheet for each child using three main headings. The first, Miscue analysis, was there to make the pattern of errors clearer, using sub-headings of ‘no response’ (with words marked in the text where help had been requested), ‘substitution’, ‘omission’ (leaving out a letter or part of a word), ‘insertion’, ‘repetition’ and ‘correction’ with the incidence of each recorded. The second, Word attack skills, using sub-headings of ‘phonic skills’, ‘context cues’, ‘comprehension skills’, ‘anticipation of words/phrases’, ‘sight vocabulary’ and ‘word structure’, pinpointed the way each child tackled the text. The third, General comments, was where I summed up the child’s strengths and weaknesses with some suggestions for remedial work.
It should be noted that some of the problems the children experienced were caused by the limitations of vocabulary-controlled texts which, useful as they are at the early stages, often result in language that does not flow naturally, as we know. Three of the children in the low-ability reading group clearly felt no real interest in the ‘bare bones’ text they were given and simply ploughed through with wild guesses based on a few key words they recognised. This might have meant the text was too difficult, but it seemed more likely to be highlighting the emotional distress these particular children were bringing into school.
At the end of each of the three levels of text used, I added four comprehension questions to check whether the pupil had understood what they had read, for example, ‘What is the book about so far?’ (literal), ‘How do you think [the character] feels about such and such?’ (inferential), ‘What do you think will come next?’ (predictive) and ‘Do you like the book so far? Can you say why?’ (appreciative). Interestingly, some children’s answers revealed more understanding of the text than the miscue analysis had suggested and, conversely, others showed they relied more heavily on decoding words than on meaning.
There is only space here to explore the implications of my findings under ‘Miscue analysis’ and then, with more contemporary eyes, look at possible strategies to help develop such a child’s reading. Under the first heading, no response, seven out of the 23 children scored zero, all from the high-ability reading group. The highest number of ‘no responses’ for an individual pupil was 9 words from the low-ability reading group. The overall average was 2.6. What foxed them were words such as ‘Canada’, ‘scarecrow’, ‘magic’, ‘birthday’ and written contractions, such as ‘I’ll’.
Apart from the contractions, which clearly needed more work on which letters are ‘kicked out’, about half the difficulties were caused by semantic words that required more focused teaching of phonics (both analytic and synthetic) and the use of semantic cues from the surrounding context. The low-ability group ‘fell over’ compound words, like ‘birthday’, which made me realise far more practice was needed on breaking up longer words into sub-units of meaning (see the article on meaning in word structure on this website).
With the syntactic words that were omitted, such as ‘write’, it just meant more practice on silent letters, but when short, phonically-regular verbs such as ‘can’ were omitted in the phrase ‘I can read the book about the baby’, I wondered if the child in question just thought it was redundant. This was a child who happily ‘rewrote’ much of the text as he went along, for example, saying ‘I like reading’ instead of ‘I can read’, which was good to hear, but at the same time caused concern about their lack of attention to the text.
In the case of substitutions, it was interesting to note that children had more miscues in this category than any other. Only one child scored zero, while the two highest scores were 15 and 17 substitutions in a short text (average 7.6). Some of these were classic reversals such as ‘was’ for ‘saw’ and ‘who’ for ‘how’, which may have been a developmental stage or possibly an indication of dyslexia. Other common mistakes were ‘a’ for ‘the’ which obviously meant more work was needed on the high-frequency word list, ‘beds’ for ‘beads’ as they leapt over the unfamiliar ‘ea’ digraph, ‘birds’ for ‘birthday’ where the writer swung too quickly into another topic, so the children went for help to the picture of a bird and suffered from a visual miscue, and ‘mummy’ for ‘teacher’ where the child had ‘colonised’ the text.
The substitutions made by the low-ability reading group showed they generally depended too much on the initial letter or digraph, guessing the rest. The child who, for example, read ‘goblins’ for ‘giants’ at least substituted a noun from the same fairy tale genre, but it became a bit alarming when one child misread ‘ships’ for ‘helps’, rearranging three identical letters and then putting this semantic word in a syntactic slot, which suggested they had lost the meaning of the text or were never interested in the first place. The type of substitution was very varied and the strategies to help children overcome such miscues have therefore to vary, from emphasis on the structure of sentences which will help find the right response to an unknown word, to focused phonics with more attention paid to medial and end letters and digraphs, and picking out meaningful letter-clusters such as ‘ing’ (‘It’s happening!’).
Under omissions, the range was much narrower with four scoring zero and an average of 3.0, though there was one over-confident reader who omitted 13 words, mostly by ‘jumping’ from one line to another (while still making general sense of the text). About a third of the omissions were caused by lack of consonance, that is, leaving out a plural ending both for verbs and nouns. Again, contractions caused problems, with the ’t’ in ‘can’t’ being ignored, for example. The child who twice made this last miscue spotted that using ‘can’ changed the meaning of the sentence ‘he can’t find anybody to play with’ and so recast the word ‘anybody’ to ‘nobody’ to make sense of it [i.e. ‘He can find nobody to play with’.]. Here, presence of mind and sufficient grammatical knowledge came to the rescue of this young reader.
Under insertions, scores were low with an average of 1.0 with 11 children making no insertions at all. The most common insertion was to make a singular noun into a plural or where a child added a word to make it more dramatic, for example, ‘She poured the gum [all] over the scarecrow.’ Most of the insertions helped to make the text flow better or ‘personalised’ the text with words like ‘scarycrow’, but the children still needed to be more accurate at this early stage.
Within the category of repetitions, the scores were even lower, with 16 children making no repetitions, giving an average of 0.5. Sometimes repetitions occurred when the child made a substitution and was clearly uneasy with it, where the word ‘goods’ was read for ‘giants’, for example, and it did not make sense. At other times, repetitions helped to sort out miscues by going back to the beginning of the sentence. Repetitions do not seem to be highly significant, but they can help give insights into the child’s mind as they tackle a text.
Under the heading of corrections, only three children did not self-correct, which showed that they were taking advantage of their miscues to make sense of the text (average 1.7). Where a child had said ‘She made eyes [for the scarecrow] from glass buttons’, it was a good guess, but looking more closely at the word, he corrected it to ‘beads’. In another case, a child raced into the first sentence which actually said, ‘Monster loves his house’ by taking the first and last two letters of the first word and jumping to the conclusion that it read ‘Mother’, but it looks as if she fell over the word ‘his’ and quickly self-corrected. Here it is clear that this child needed to be encouraged to slow down a bit and look more carefully at the phonic structure of words.
As this evidence suggests, miscue analysis is a valuable both as a diagnostic and a formative tool which can investigate children’s reading on a micro-level, providing a ‘window into the mind’ both on an intellectual and emotional level. By spotting the patterns of miscues, it offers a way of targeting which strategies will be most useful not only on an individual, but also on a group and class basis.
References
Department of Children, Schools and Families www.standards.dfes.gov.uk
N. C. Farnes, Unit 4, Reading Development, The Open University, 1973
Procedure for miscue analysis or running reading records
Based on www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary /casestudies/isp/reading/1151505/1151399
•Select and photocopy a text that is at guided reading and tuition level (i.e. 90%-95% of the text read correctly) for an individual or group of children who need particular help. The length and difficulty of the text can vary from 75 words for low-ability readers to over 125 words for high-ability ones (average 100).
•Write out about four comprehension questions which include literal and inferential levels.
•If not already familiar with the symbols for marking up miscue analysis, see below.
•Explain to the pupil why they are doing this procedure and that it is not a test but to help them develop their reading, then ask them to read the passage aloud in their own time.
•As they read, mark any errors on the photocopy. If they hesitate too long, give them the word and mark it with an H.
•If the child pauses continuously and cannot make sense of the text, choose an easier one. The procedure will have identified the correct level of text for this pupil or possibly highlighted an emotional block to reading.
•Once the text has been finished, praise the child’s reading, then go through the comprehension questions. If they have not been able to do this adequately, use questions that pinpoint the sections of the text that will help them.
•Afterwards, examine the type and number of errors to find the patterns of the errors.
•In the light of these patterns, work out the strategies needed to help the pupil develop their reading. Explain to them how they can help themselves with these strategies and become more independent readers.
Recording the miscues
no response (pupil does not read the word or any part of it) ---------
self-correction (reads the word incorrectly at first, but then
corrects themselves) SC
omission (misses part of a word out) circle the word
insertion (adds a word/s not in the text) Λ
hesitation (hesitates but allow them time to read
or self-correct before intervening) H or /
reversal (reverses word, e.g. ‘saw’ for ‘was’) ‘s’ on its side
substitution (substitutes an incorrect word) cross out misread word and
write substituted word above
repetition (repeats a word or phrase) r
Published in Literacy Today, September 2007