Looking at Miscue Analysis

When we listen to children read out loud we can sometimes be too critical and focused on what words he or she is missing or just plain getting it wrong.  The truth though is that children are using their own strategies on how to make sense of an unfamiliar text.  A good miscue analysis provides a goal "to understand how flexibly and efficiently the reader is integrating all the cues to predict, confirm, or discard hypotheses while making meaning with a text (Wohlwend, 2012).  This new view on the miscue analysis allows us to look at how a child reads a sentence as a whole rather than just narrowing our vision to single words.

Through our class discussion with Dr. Wohlwend, I have learned that there are three key questions in conducting a good miscue analysis, which are: does it sound like good English? (syntax), does it make sense? (semantics), and was there a meaning change? (comprehension).  We have also been introduced to the spider chart, which helps put the information from our miscue analysis into a format to visualize the relationships between the three systems.  If a good miscue analysis requires looking at the sentence as a whole and not just single words, it only makes sense that the information we get should also be looked at as a whole and not separate, unrelated parts of our analysis. The spider chart can help us visualize a child's strengths and weaknesses in regards to the three systems.

I admit that before I became familiar with children's techniques in reading an unfamiliar text I would have thought to myself after hearing a child read, "Where did that come from?  That word doesn't even look the same or sound the same."  Having some familiarity now though, I can better understand where kids are pulling their ideas.  Just this past week I was helping out in a first grade math class.  We were working on word problems and I was with a small group of about 4-5 students.  One little boy was sitting next to me and he wanted to read the next problem out loud for our group.  He could read some of the words by himself (many of these were part of the class's "word wall" of sight words) but with many he struggled.  His reading though still made sense; he was reading sentences and not just words.  Because we were in the middle of a group math lesson we had to keep moving.  Afterwards, however, he was looking at that same problem and pointed out to me the words 'toy' and 'toys'.  I recall that when he had been reading out loud he said something like car or another word that didn't seem very close.  He did notice though that they were the same word but one had an 's' on the end.  It just made me think of the connections kids make in the moment and the ones they can make when given some more time.

As current or future teachers, being able to recognize how a child reads and makes sense of a text can help us become better at choosing the right reading material for our students and what kinds of strategies or mini lessons we can work on.  The point of anything we as teachers do in that capacity should always be to find out how best to help our students.