Article
What a teacher hears,
what a reader sees:
Eye movements from
a phonics-taught second
grader
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
0(0) 1–21
! The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1468798411417081
ecl.sagepub.com
Joel Brown
University of Arizona, USA
Koomi Kim
New Mexico State University, USA
Kathleen O’Brien Ramirez
Université de Poitiers, France
Abstract
This article examines how a second-grader demonstrates that reading is not about
decoding letters and words in linear order but is a more complex activity involving
the reader’s decisions with respect to several aspects of their knowledge of their language and how comprehension is key to transacting with texts. The paper observes and
documents the reader’s reading comprehension process using eye-movement and
miscue analysis (EMMA). EMMA data illuminate this reader’s strengths as a reader
while also demystifying misconceptions about the reading process, thus challenging the
politicized phonics-first perspective found in many English-speaking countries regarding
how reading is being assessed and taught.
Keywords
EMMA, eye-movement and miscue analysis, miscue analysis, reading strategies, reading
process, teacher education
Introduction
A reader spends 13 seconds on vocalizing the first two words of the second
sentence of a story she is attempting to read, 22 seconds if you add the
Corresponding author:
Koomi Kim, New Mexico State University, 1810 Payne Street, Apt 15, Las Cruces, NM 88001, USA
Email: [email protected]
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subsequent time she is silent. If one simply listens to this reader, Ali, one could
think she has a reading problem. Some hear her difficulty and believe she needs
more extensive instruction in sound-symbol relationships.
However, Ali’s oral reading miscues from this sentence, together with the
added information from her eye movements, present a different picture. Eyemovement data reveal why a transactive view of reading is needed and what
‘correct-the-reader’ practice fails to recognize. Although a focus on lettersound relationships may appear obvious to an unquestioning adult, which
has led to the persistence of the belief that reading problems may be solved by
‘sounding out’ letters, this is a misleading assumption in English.
Literacy education in the USA, as well as in other countries, is in need of
critical, theoretical and practical knowledge to support educators in resisting
legislative mandates that require prescriptive myopically-designed programmes. Pre-service and in-service teachers often have unexamined prejudicial
assumptions about readers and the reading process (Cole, 2000; Garan, 2004;
Kim et al., 2007). Many of these assumptions, that reading is decoding symbols,
that it is strictly sequential, are spread through public media-reported ‘common
sense’ notions about reading instruction. Legislation comes to rely on research
that is questionably interpreted, although loudly proclaimed as ‘scientific’, and
limits reading to being a mechanical process and hence readers to a set of
unreflective and uncritical behavioural responses.
In the face of the US propensity to opt for reductionistic and logistically
expedient denotations of reading and to glean simplistic ‘accountability’
attributes from such complex events, eye-movement and miscue analysis
(EMMA; see Duckett, 2002, 2003; Kim et al., 2007; Paulson, 2000, 2005;
Paulson et al., 2003) researchers have sought to deepen their understanding of
what readers do. The use of miscue analysis has contributed much to this
interest. Miscues are any unexpected renderings a reader makes with respect
to a given text. These are recorded, not to be judged as mistakes but to be
analysed as information that shows patterns in a reader’s activity.
The basic procedure is to present a reader with a complete text that is new to
them and ask the reader to read aloud as if they were reading by themselves, and
then to retell after reading. Departures from an expected (accurate) rendering of
a text are neither good nor bad in themselves. They do however provide information about how a reader is working with a text, insight into a reader’s understanding of the text, and help reveal strategies the reader is using (Davenport,
2002; Goodman et al., 2005). A substitution miscue is an example of a miscue
category, when a reader replaces one word for another. It may be a word that
is graphically similar but unrelated in meaning (revealing a focus on phonics);
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or, it may be a synonym (revealing a focus on meaning), or even a repeated nonword that may be used as a temporary placeholder (as meaning is being formed).
The quality of a miscue, which reflects information about the reader generating
it, is significant in miscue research. By examining readers’ departures from a
given text, miscue analysis has found proficient readers to be comprehension
focused (Brown et al., 1996; Strauss et al., 2009).
Over the past decade, researchers have begun to use miscue analysis and eyemovement data in tandem as a research perspective. EMMA researchers have
worked with scores of readers from many age groups. This has involved readers
reading a variety of genres and has investigated the reading in a multitude of
different languages. EMMA research adds to almost a half century of research
utilizing oral reading miscue analysis as a procedure for understanding readers.
For the reader we discuss here, the eye-movement data were acquired using
eye-tracking equipment from Applied Science Laboratory (ASL). This includes a
camera that records an infrared light reflected from a reader’s eye and a unit that
calculates the location of the eye with respect to reading material presented on a
computer screen. Avideo recording is made during the reading to provide a realtime relationship between the movement of the eye (represented by an active
cursor moving over the image of the text) and the voice of the reader. It is
the video recording we share with pre- and in-service teachers. Using ASL software, the eye-movement data are processed, thus rendering eye movements as a
series of fixations and saccades. For the purpose of this paper we also provide
processed data from the sentence discussed. The reading example we present
was obtained at the EMMA laboratory at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
A miscue coding and eye-movement analysis of one sentence introduces
Ali as a reader. The implications of Ali’s oral reading, her eye-movement data
and responses from pre- and in-service teachers will be discussed.
Ali and her reading
Ali is a bright monolingual second-grader with light reddish hair. She is softly
spoken and has demonstrated an interest and ability in art. Her school has
adopted a major phonics-based reading programme. Concern over her poor
scores in tests of phonics skills led her parents to purchase phonics reading
products for their home in the hope of helping Ali with her reading. Her father,
a university scientist, became puzzled by the limited nature of the materials they
purchased and brought Ali to the reading laboratory to see if a more understandable reason for her problem could be found. In the lab, we recorded her
oral reading and eye movements with respect to the text she read.
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Ali sits in front of the computer to read The Man Who Kept House, a folk
tale about a woodcutter who believes his wife’s work at home is easy. The
man switches places with his wife with predictably catastrophic results.
For Ali’s reading we follow the protocols of miscue analysis, as mentioned:
Ali reads a complete story she has not read before, she reads without interference, probes or outside help, and she is asked to retell what she reads
(Goodman et al., 2005).
What a teacher hears: The sounds of Ali’s miscues
In apparent recognition of a major difficulty, as Ali begins the second sentence in
the story she produces the first of three miscues that will be discussed. Her
reading is as follows (Figure 1, with coding for the second sentence).
When Ali comes to the first two words of the second sentence, ‘One evening . . . ’, she begins to stumble. Her oral miscues for the second sentence are
shown as follows:
Ali: ‘On every – one – every, when e-, one-every-t-, e(h)ery-(th)ing, every(h)in’, at which point she becomes silent for nine seconds. Later in the text,
she substitutes ‘does’ for ‘do’. And in the last part of the text, she says ‘I’m’ for
‘I am’. All of these, she self-corrects during her oral reading.
‘One evening . . . ’: Ali’s first miscue
Ali miscues the first word of the second sentence of the story, and at the second
word, ‘evening’, she appears to rethink her reading. She self-corrects ‘on’ to
‘one’ and yet remains stuck on ‘evening’. She then abandons her correction and
Figure 1. Ali’s miscues as she reads the second sentence of The Man Who Kept House
Note: Underlining indicates words included in her miscue. Above-line text is a representation
of her oral miscues. The circled ‘c’ indicates self-correction.
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tries something else, testing the word ‘when’, but returns to ‘one’ after a single
substitution proves ineffective. She applies a phonics strategy in earnest, but
without success. The process she is using can be discerned by listening to how
she manipulates the graphophonic or letter-sound system, for example ‘on’ and
‘one’, and her attempt with a similarly sounding word, ‘when’. In listening to
her, it can be seen that she has two choices: focus more directly on the letters, or
continue reading. For 13 seconds she focuses on letters, but this does not provide
her with access to acceptable language. So she becomes silent.
When this oral reading sample is presented to and discussed by in-service
and pre-service teachers, this miscue is commonly a major focus of discussion.
The types of questions presented are: ‘What kind of reader is Ali?’, ‘What, if
anything, does she need to know or do to understand the text?’. Invariably,
several in the room point out that Ali is indeed in trouble and not attending
closely enough to the text: ‘She relies on sounding out and she . . . cannot read
the word.’, ‘She seems like an extremely struggling reader because she keeps
repeating the same things over and over again.’, ‘She wasn’t really reading’.
Comprehension: Listener and reader
To anyone who understands the words it may appear obvious that she is
skipping the letter ‘n’ in ‘evening’. Hearing her attempts to break down the
words into sounds, to formulate and test her own versions, it appears that a more
direct focus on the letters might help. There is no ‘r’ or ‘th’ in ‘evening’ for
example. Ali herself seems to support this assessment by changing letters so
much that her reading sounds confused. Her variance of letters and sounds may
also show that she is experimenting, seeking to find potential words that might
be sensible in the text. But listeners are more inclined to affirm that Ali’s
vocalized attempts show she is not attending to what seems obvious to them.
Readily knowing, they think, what Ali appears to miss, they prescribe increased
attention to phonics, to the ‘sounding out’ of letters and, on occasion, even
derive from Ali’s reading of these two words several phonics-based rules and
axioms to suggest. Hearing only her stumbling at the beginning of the second
sentence, Ali is seen as a deficient reader, not a learning one. Commenting on her
silence, they often believe she is simply staring at the words because she possesses
insufficient phonics skills to decipher them, or has simply quit and is waiting for
outside help. This puts aside the more complex comprehension questions: ‘What
could she say?’, ‘What would make sense?’. Is this reader lost, or is she actively
involved in testing potential solutions using the information given, working
with what she tacitly knows about her language to reach meaning?
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If Ali’s activity is seen as meaning-making, as her very recognition that ‘On
every’ is insufficient suggests, this would question whether added attention to
a graphophonics (letter-sound) regimen is instructionally productive. Her
problem is not that she is aware that she does not know particular lettersound relationships, her problem is that what she is saying is not fitting her
expectations for language. Even if she were focusing at word level, she could
have settled for ‘on every’ as real words and gone on. Indeed, she may have no
trouble with these words in other contexts. Although ‘evening’ does not occur
again in this story, as a word ‘one’ occurs four times. In the previous sentence
Ali renders it correctly. In the sentence under discussion she both corrects and
abandons her correction. Later, she renders it correctly, and in the last instance
acceptably substitutes ‘the’ for ‘one’ in the sentence: ‘So he put one end of a
rope . . .’. Something other than word recognition or letter-sound knowledge
must be involved. To add to the time spent on one particular aspect of a text
that is not making sense can disrupt the meaning a reader is constructing; she
could become distracted by an expectation of meaning.
For meaning-oriented readers, however, as they become further involved in
a text their miscues change (Menosky, 1971). The first few miscues may not
show a significant degree of concern for meaning. As context develops, the
broadening meaning begins to inform the reader regarding semantically acceptable language, the quality of the miscues changes, and a degree of concern for
meaning may become clear. For example, in the first sentence, Ali made two
miscues, substituting the word ‘woman’ for ‘woodman’ and ‘on’ for ‘no’, and
left these unchanged. If Ali were merely sounding out or word calling for the
sake of speed or ‘fluency’, the semantically unacceptable substitutions would
continue. Her silence could actually mean that she has disengaged from the text.
It may be, however, that she is searching for more information, in thought or, as
her eye movements reveal, actively seeking information elsewhere on the page.
For Ali, in the second sentence, she begins to reveal her concern for meaning.
What Ali’s eyes see
Ali’s eye movements (Figure 2) show how she resolves her quandary and affirm
that her successful strategy is to focus on comprehension rather than on letters
and sounds. Her demand for sense overpowers puzzling over sounds. We told
her to read the text as if she were by herself, to read as she usually reads. She
took her time, although clearly her persistence in, and strategy for, seeking
comprehensible language would not produce strong scores on a ‘timed test’ or
be found in a phonics drill classroom experience.
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Figure 2. Ali’s repeated attempts represented by multiple fixations over the words ‘One evening’ (numbered eye fixations 71–87) and her
silent look ahead (fixations 87–95)
Note: Circles represent points at which Ali’s eyes fixate upon the text. A fixation is when the eyes stop and information to approximately 1–
2 and, depending on font size and distance from the reader, a three- to six-letter width area may be clearly in focus. The lines between fixations are saccades, during which the eyes are moving and no text information is perceived.
Brown et al.
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Figure 2 represents both Ali’s voiced attempts at ‘One evening’ and her
eye movements during her silence. As she vocalizes her multiple attempts
of ‘One evening’ her eyes hover over those words of the text (fixations 71–
87). The large collection of her eye fixations appears as the mass of overlaid
circles and numbers at the left. Then, as she becomes silent, her eyes proceed
across the sentence (fixations 87–95). After fixation 95, she returns to the
beginning of the sentence to read aloud again, at which point she confidently
produces ‘One evening when he came home from work . . .’. Using
information she gained during her silence, from the sentence she is reading,
she self-corrects.
Ali goes to great length, 22 seconds, in her search for language that works.
From a phonics perspective it is clear that, in the beginning, she is not in sync
with the text, although at one point or another the letter-sound artefacts are
present. And although hearing Ali’s initial misrepresentations of words
may elicit correction responses from some listeners, correction is unnecessary.
The activity of the reader is far more sophisticated and self-managed. Her
effort and resolution demonstrate that she is aware that her first renditions are
not acceptable, that she is making decisions about her strategy use, and has
concern for finding meaning in what she is reading.
Is there knowledge underlying Ali’s first miscue?
Both the first and second sentences are shown with Ali’s miscues in the second
sentence (Figure 1). Consider the opening sentence: ‘Once upon a time there
was a woodman who thought that no one worked as hard as he did.’ If this
thought were continued, one could next expect something like, ‘On every
job . . .’ or ‘On everything he worked . . .’. These are potential routes for the
author of the story and possible structures that Ali may have expected or been
testing. The thought could have been that everything the woodman did was
harder than anything anyone else did.
Unfortunately, the second sentence begins a slightly divergent thought,
some would argue a new paragraph, sounding almost like the beginning
of a new story, ‘One evening . . .’ which is so akin to ‘[Late] one evening . . .’.
As mentioned, she may know these words in other contexts, hence more
context in the text may have helped: ‘Then, one evening, . . .’. Or, there
could have been a comma after ‘evening’. As Fries (2008) points out, specific
words are influenced by the contexts in which they are used. As contexts vary
for any word, that word may become a significantly different word. At the
least, there are potential structures that Ali may be considering, her miscues
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triggered by inadequacies in the text itself. When Ali realizes that the text is
not matching her expectations, she experiments to try to reach what she can
sense to be a meaningful sentence. Her miscues may reflect her attempts to
realize potential contexts she is positing as solutions.
What of Ali’s silence?
After her manipulations of the text, Ali becomes silent for nine seconds. It is
because of her silence that many in an instructional position believe that Ali
is lost and requires help. Historically, research and evaluation procedures have
often allowed only five seconds before the researcher or scripted instructor
checks a word as unknown, or simply provides a word to a reader. Long
pauses during oral reading have traditionally meant that children are not on
task or, at the least, that they have run out of options and are doing nothing.
Ali, however, spends her silent time actively extending her search of the text
for more information.
We offered Ali no interruption. We did not point to the words, nor ask her
to re-read any of the text. Ali’s resolution is spontaneous, completely in line
with her own abilities and needs. Also, she uses a look-ahead strategy, as seen
by many reading researchers who have examined reading and eye-movement
(Buswell, 1920; Duckett, 2002; Kim et al., 2007; Paulson, 2005; Paulson and
Freeman, 2003). As she proceeded, she notably set aside her experience with
phonics-based instruction.
In summary, Ali’s eye movements show her to be working to resolve her
problem with the beginning words of the sentence, first, by testing her graphophonic knowledge, and then by going beyond the words ‘One evening’. As
she goes silent, providing no vocal or visual information to an observer, her
eyes proceed forward across the sentence, after which she returns to the beginning of the sentence to vocalize her self-revision, the conventional text. Even
using 22 seconds, she does not spend so much time that, for her, the maintenance of comprehension suffers, and she does return to the text to produce it
conventionally. As her first miscue’s self-correction indicates, she is a self-managed reader. Similarly with her second.
A further sleight of Ali’s eye: Her second miscue
Consider Ali’s second miscue (Figure 1). As Ali reads on, a similar expression
of her reading occurs in an instant as she reads ‘What does’ and self-corrects
to ‘What do’.
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To a listener, Ali’s second miscue may at first appear to be simple. She
substitutes ‘does’ for ‘do’. And, again, she self-corrects, this time relatively
quickly, to produce the text conventionally. Her own analysis does not
seem as involved as with the previous miscue; it is, however, as obscure to
listeners. Also, her eye movements respective to her voice reveal the same
concern as before: English she can accept. A listener who hears her saying
‘What does – What do . . .’ may easily consider that Ali’s self-correction is
based on her looking more closely at the text. Having said ‘does’, she sees
the text in the moment, focuses in, and suddenly realizes that it is not ‘does’,
and therefore self-corrects. However, the interaction between Ali and the
text is less simple. In this instance, as Ali completes her voicing of ‘does’,
the video recording shows her eyes are on the following line, on the word
‘you’. Her eyes are on ‘you’ a full second before she voices her self-correction.
‘What does’, an acceptable prediction, becomes unacceptable as she progresses through the text. ‘Does’ is a prediction. She does not say ‘doe’
(phonic correlate of ‘go’, ‘so’) nor stall at other possible sounds for ‘o’.
‘What does’ begins a viable sentence since both ‘does’ and ‘do’ are auxiliary
verbs. She uses a word that is acceptable and meaningful to that point in
the sentence. Only after seeing ‘you’ does she return to begin the sentence
again. It is not within her dialect to say ‘What does you . . .’. Such a sentence is
syntactically and semantically unacceptable to her. According to Ali’s eyemovement data, by fixating on ‘you’, not continuing to fixate on ‘do’, Ali
shows she does not need to look more closely at ‘do’ to see that it was not
‘does’. It is when she fixates on ‘you’ that she realizes ‘What do’ is the
grammatically acceptable form.
While her earlier silent looking ahead with ‘One evening’ might yet be
argued to be an extension of simply decoding more information, Ali’s selfcorrection here is clearly one of her changing her prediction of ‘does’ because it
is constrained when followed by ‘you’. Just as her self-correcting ‘One evening’
required more context, not more attention to letter sounds in the words, her
self-correction is again prompted by reading ahead (Figure 3), gaining more
information from subsequent text, disconfirming her prediction, and deciding
that the language she is producing is not acceptable to her. She is seeking the
best fit for what she knows of her language.
Ali’s third miscue and her instructional experience
Ali’s response to the third miscue from this sentence is a significant one due
to her self-correction. She continues reading and very efficiently makes a
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Figure 3. Ali’s noted fixations with times (marked from onset of recording) and correlated audio
Note: Correlation based on conjunction of audio-voiced ‘d’, video cursor and fixation point occurring at (2). Fixation 1 is on ‘do’. Fixation 2
is coincident to the onset of vocalizing the ‘d’ of ‘does’. Fixation 3 is on ‘you’ as Ali completes vocalizing ‘does’, after which she returns to
the sentence beginning and voices her self-correction. Fixations 4–5 are on ‘What’ and then slightly above ‘do’. As she is orally producing
‘do’ her fixation 6 is on the later occurring ‘am’.
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contraction of the text’s ‘I am’ when she says ‘I’m’. While her concern has,
until now, been demonstrably one of meaning, at this point she appears to be
comfortable enough to expend energy on text reproduction. Instructionally,
accurate text reproduction has been a primary concern in her classroom
experience and here it is also revealed to be a concern for her, even when
her miscue shows linguistic competence. Although her use of ‘I’m’ indicates
and genuinely supports a judgement that she is comprehending, a sign to a
listener that her comprehension is intact, she chooses to correct it. This is an
unnecessary correction if she is focused on meaning, yet, it may be said at this
point, that her comprehension is broad enough and she is confident enough
that she can afford such deference to what her classroom instruction and tests
seem to value.
The strengths in Ali’s reading
While the influence of an instructional focus on phonics is clearly discernible
in Ali’s reading, she has other strengths that support her reading. As shown in
her flexible use of strategies, her tacit requirement that what she reads should
make sense is her greatest overall strength. As comprehension provides the
reason for any reading, her strategic sampling of text, as her eye movements
show during her nine seconds of silence on ‘One evening,’ as well as her look
ahead at ‘you’, provide information that she uses to reach acceptable comprehensible language.
Ali uses her graphophonic knowledge in a malleable self-regulated fashion.
She includes other aspects, such as her syntactic knowledge, word meaning
knowledge, linguistic knowledge of the structures possible in the language,
and what the language means in the context of the story. It is probable that her
background experience with the genre of folk tales plays some part because
our readers have often remarked how much information they come to expect
from reading something that begins with ‘Once upon a time’. The 22 seconds
Ali takes before self-correcting may be an unusually long time to experiment,
even if exploring more than one strategy, yet Ali did not over-extend herself in
her interest for knowing ‘One evening’. It is her own decisions that allow
her to move forward in the text. Sense, its presence and sensitivity to its
disruption, is something that only readers themselves can immediately judge.
Ali’s instructional experience with a single reading strategy could explain
her silence during her nine seconds of looking ahead. In looking ahead for
more information she knew she would not be following her experience of her
teacher’s instructions. As many readers we have worked with indicate, Ali may
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have become silent because she had ceased attending to the troubling words
and believed that ‘looking ahead’ would be cheating. Becoming silent at this
point would conceal her setting aside her instructional experience because a
teacher listening would not know that she was circumventing the expectation
of looking closer at a word to sound it out. Ali’s concern, however, is with
comprehending a text, not as trying to pass a phonics test. This, not test
scores, will carry her through her life as a reader.
Singular emphasis reconsidered
In the US climate of the phonics/anti-phonics debate it is clear that Ali uses
her knowledge of phonics in her reading. Her miscues indicate that she may
be overemphasizing the graphophonic cueing system by not choosing to look
ahead sooner or by making miscues that have high sound and graphic similarities. The critical question is not whether readers do or do not, should or
should not, use a particular strategy, but whether it is appropriate to emphasize one single aspect of reading instructionally, and judge the ‘reading’ of
early readers on the limited grounds of that single aspect. Ali’s example suggests instruction that recognizes and accommodates the contributions and
interrelatedness of all aspects of a reader’s experience of a language.
Historically, however, it appears that reading has been considered to be the
unhesitant and unbroken accurate oral reproduction of a text, and that this can
be achieved by a mechanical ‘sounding out’ or decoding of letters on a page.
In the face of much confounding research and classroom knowledge, the
tenacity of this belief about reading is surprising. There is a problematic
relationship of letters to sounds in English as noted in Clymer’s (1963)
study or in Johnston’s (2001) study of elementary school texts that found
a poor relationship of phonic rules to the words in students’ texts. Given
programme-compliant instructional texts that hence use unnatural controlled
vocabulary, we wonder if the low correspondence of phonics rules to the
natural language children experience creates the very sense in beginning
readers of ‘reading’ as separate from learning.
Adherence to a left-to-right, letter-by-letter, sound-by-sound belief
would clearly be detrimental for Ali. Yet it persists as an instructional
focus. It is as if given a ‘d’ followed by an ‘o’ the sound of the ‘o’ is obvious
(doe, do, done, dog. . .) or that saying the letters ‘‘‘i’’ ‘‘o’’ inch’, for ‘10 inch’
is a letter-sound relationship. There are no phonics rules that will tell how to
‘sound out’ the word R-E-A-D. Syntactic information is needed to read ‘read’,
information that may not even be found in a sentence such as: ‘That’s the
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book I read in my social studies class. Was it yesterday, or is it ongoing today?’.
One’s predictive nature will not let one stop at ‘read’, wondering if it is ‘red’
or ‘reed’, questioning which phonic rule(s) may be applied, or if such rules
exist – one will try the most probable predictable form, and only later selfcorrect, if and when more context evolves to suggest correction. This is the
case even if that context requires waiting for information well beyond the
reading of a given text. Yet, for programmed instruction, such questions
remain ignored, left to the status of students’ extracurricular lives.
Currently, in the USA, one part of the DIBELS, a simplistic test for
young readers used extensively throughout the country, uses ‘nonsense
words’ (for a review, see Goodman, 2006). Using non-words in tests of reading, implies, arguably teaches, that saying letter sounds is what reading is.
Questionable as the lesson is, as time spent in school this cannot but influence
the ideas children have of what reading is. To the extent that any aspect of
language is overemphasized, it becomes a distraction from meaningful reading.
The treatment of students’ graphophonic knowledge as an end rather than as
a means to comprehension places an external and rigid restriction on what
a reader requires to become internal and flexible. Similarly, an over-concern for
reading words perfectly at first sight renders reading a tedious and unpleasant
experience. Through single-emphasis programmes, artificial texts and the
correlated testing of abstracted skills (e.g. using non-words as nonsense
rather than placeholders), reading becomes an independent subject that can
be failed, rather than a tool to gather information, construct new understandings of the world, explore the thoughts of unfamiliar authors, or even enjoy a
familiar one. Unfortunately for students who most experience them, singleemphasis low-context programmes at best undermine the credibility of instruction. At worst, they can create a disenfranchised stratum of self-proclaimed
non-readers (Bacon, 2006).
Perceiving comprehending: The importance of teacher
awareness
In teacher education, it is important to understand how Ali is processing text.
There are too many occasions in which the obvious obscures the actual.
For teachers, of reading in particular, an understanding of the role of comprehension and the activity of comprehending in reading is critical to advising
and supporting developing readers effectively.
As for all readers, there is text that may be miscued, just as for any reader
there exists text that may at first seem incomprehensible. The data for Ali’s
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reading of the one sentence as presented are not representative of how data
from all other sentences she confronts would look (Paulson et al., 2003).
What her eye movements do show in this one sentence, however, are processes that miscue analysis suggests underlie all reading (Hudelson, 1981).
They show Ali to be first and foremost an actively engaged reader who is
intelligently self-managing her efforts. In the decisions she makes as she reads,
she shows she is sensitive to meaning; as Menosky’s (1971) work suggests,
meaning itself is a resource for reading.
Yet this understanding is too often pushed aside, if not ignored entirely.
As mentioned, teachers who have heard Ali’s reading sample often miss the
last miscue, the over-correction of ‘I am’ from ‘I’m’. Just as phonics-taught
readers may roll right through text rendering nonsensical language (even
when an oral reading may ‘sound’ right to a listener, comprehension may
be quite limited), it is common for observers of readers themselves to miss a
young reader’s high-quality miscues. In virtually any context, some variation
of, or alternative for, words used is possible. The particulars of a language can
change and be changed, just as a letter may sound different in different words,
or at a different time an author would not write the same piece, even when
making the same point. Indeed, in tape-recorded analysis of adults reading
with children it is clear that adults themselves often make the same constructive ‘errors’ as the early readers they listen to (Page, 1973).
Among students themselves, ‘good’ readers tend to overlook their strengths,
strengths that if consciously known could be invaluable to ‘good’ and to ‘poor’
readers alike (Bacon, 2006; Goodman, 2003; Moore and Gillis, 2005). For the
youngest of readers, preschool or emergent readers, their acceptable departures
from a given text, or high-quality miscues, may be glossed over; if noticed, they
could be recognized as a way to maintain their developing sense of story
(Applebee, 1978; Wells, 1986). As schooling progresses, this comes to be, at
the least, rhetorically rejected. The notion of the exact reproduction of a text
becomes the premier reading measure considered. In not recognizing their own
transactions with text, many come to believe that schoolchildren must learn the
‘‘basics’’ first, not make miscues or circumvent directions, but master what
single emphasis programmes reward. Over time, proficient readers, no doubt
supported by a history of high test scores and what they have learned a ‘mistake’ means, become the most resistant to accepting that even they can make
miscues (Costello, 1996). When confronted with a new text, better readers
come to believe they read accurately when they make sense, but, as tape recording can reveal, this is distinctly not the same as saying that they reproduce the
text exactly as it is written.
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Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 0(0)
Leaving the strengths demonstrated by high-quality miscues unrecognized
allows low-quality miscues to be isolated from the contexts in which they
occur. Once stripped of context, a resource Ali clearly employs for judging
revision, by narrowing attention from ideas down to single words, and even
down to letters, any correspondingly reduced instructional effort can hardly
meet the challenge of creating the high-quality reading it professes to strive for
because this is lacking in its very practice. The result is that, in many US schools,
as Allington (2007) points out, those who are most in need of a rich experience
in literacy are those who are most remediated away from that experience.
Underscoring the importance of understanding the constructive and strategic
reader, and often as hidden to a listener’s understanding as a reader’s eye
movements, some children unintentionally obscure their own thinking processes from teachers. In accommodating their instruction, they form their own
meanings for terms that they hear. Children cite ‘sounding out’ as their strategy
even when it does ‘not reflect their actual reading behaviors’ (Compton-Lilly,
2005: 445). There are surprisingly complex interpretations that children use
as tacit knowledge for ‘sound it out’. A reader may interpret ‘sound it out’ as
trying a multiplicity of possible sounds or words to find what will fit within the
context of a given text (Brown, 1996). ‘How does that sound to you?’ takes on
a resonant sense, without serious connection to a specific letter or word. But
these results of meaning-making are invisible to teachers who are trained to
teach the dictums and jargon of pre-packaged instructional programmes, especially when their own measure of success is to get uninspired students to score
well on a programme’s tests.
As shown by miscue analysis, all readers make miscues in reading
(Goodman, 1996). As Ali’s EMMA data reflect, comprehending rests with
the strategic self-managed reader working through a multifaceted awareness
of how a text can be made meaningful. This is not to say that all readers are
aware that they miscue, nor do all readers consciously recognize the resources
they use and processes they participate in when they read. For teachers of young
readers, however, such an awareness of how readers are actually processing text
is critical. For instruction to be supportive of readers, an appreciation of the
confluence of all aspects of language is needed to understand a reader, as all
these will be employed by a reader if reading is to serve a reader’s purpose.
As teachers become aware of the reading process and strategic reading, they
begin to value how readers make sense of what they read and begin to see
significance in the complexities of how readers make a text comprehensible
to themselves. After discussing Ali’s example, many pre- and in-service teachers begin to understand that there is more to reading than reproducing text.
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Brown et al.
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As one pre-service teacher put it, ‘. . . because you get a better understanding
of how the reader thinks’ (Kim et al., in press). Though schools and legislation may make it appear that reading is something that can be mastered by
third grade, as a second-grader, Ali demonstrates constructive activity in her
reading that is found in seventh- and eighth-graders, in high-schoolers and in
adults alike (Goodman and Marek, 1996) and, as mentioned, found in the
reading of a multitude of languages (Brown et al., 1996).
EMMA and the reading process
The miscues and added information from eye-movement studies show that
readers are not passive reproducers of text (Paulson et al., 2003). Ali is actively
and continually seeking information. Her eye movements and miscue data
show that she is integrating multiple cognitive reading strategies. Eye movement research, as in Ali’s case, suggests that readers are acting to their full
capacity in their search for meaning. When miscues happen it is a question
of the nature of the information, insights and strategies the reader is using. To
direct a reader instructionally to the word they happen to be saying is simplistic
and can, as would happen with Ali, divert the reader from the information that
he or she is negotiating. Readers do not fixate on every word. Predictable words
and phrases may be skipped while the reader not only looks ahead but also at
illustrations or other sections of the text without a break in their oral reading.
Readers’ eyes are commonly looking at text ahead of what they are orally
producing (referred to as the eye-voice span; Buswell, 1920, 1922; Rode,
1974-5). Readers say words they do not look at and look at words they do
not say. They employ multiple cueing systems, graphophonic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic, to arrive at their ideas of what a text means (Duckett, 2003;
Paulson and Freeman, 2003). Even without specific eye-movement information, as we have provided in our example of Ali, a significant means for supporting comprehension is for educators to understand how oral deviation from
expected text can reflect comprehension and to recognize which strategies these
might indicate. The quality of miscues can inform instructional direction
through teachers’ recognition of when and how comprehension occurs.
With respect to the traditional view of reading, as with Ali’s example,
miscues (substitutions, omissions, insertions and corrections) are not a problem in reading but a means to understand the strategies readers use (sampling,
predicting, confirming, correcting, integrating). Eye-movement data emphasize their significance and reflect readers’ constructive activity, even beyond
what a teacher may hear. When a reader becomes silent, the meaning-centred
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reader is already forming a question, contemplating possibilities. Simply,
patience can provide opportunities to support a reader’s meaning-seeking.
In an interactive situation, to ask questions, such as ‘What is your question?’,
‘What do you know about the story/text so far?’, ‘What could be put there?’,
‘Does that make sense?’, ‘What are you thinking?’ or ‘Why is that?’, can add
considerable depth to a teacher’s, as well as a reader’s, understanding of the
reader’s cognitive activity (Goodman, 2003; Goodman and Marek, 1996;
Moore and Gillis, 2005). It is a constructive listener who will hear strategies
at work. For the reasons mentioned, it may take time for some readers to
respond to a change in instruction, a shift to one that emphasizes a noncompetitive qualitative view of reading. This is especially true for older readers
who have also learned so many programme-based or otherwise abstract reasons to think of themselves as non-readers (Bacon, 2006). How much of a
reader’s growing comprehension is arrested by the reader who stops reading
with the instruction-bound self-assessment of ‘I don’t know that word’, or by
a teacher implying as much, in saying ‘Look at that word again’?
Concluding comments on the significance of Ali’s reading
With the current, and seemingly recurrent, reductionistic political climate
in many English-speaking countries, as found in the USA, many teachers and
students are required to use highly prescribed skill-based scripted reading programmes and assessment tools (Strauss, 2005). Yet, as such programmes are
being implemented in a variety of schools across the USA, the Office of
Inspector General (Office of Inspector General US Department of Education,
2007) reports that they are ineffective in helping children to develop reading
comprehension. Historically, such programmes have done little to improve
the general reading ability of students, despite testing of particular programme
foci having revealed particular related effects. The complexity demonstrated in
Ali’s reading implies that much of the direct, scripted and instructional practice
fails to support readers who are actively seeking to understand texts.
Ali’s example shows that a simplistic definition of reading is inadequate to
address her abilities. A left-to-right letter-by-letter word-by-word interpretation is an inadequate conception of reading. A focus on such a view will not
support Ali’s growth in reading, nor will further testing of her phonics skills
be an adequate form of assessment. There are commercial programmes, as
evidenced in the textbooks of education’s history, that purport to solve reading
problems. These programmes often place a specific, narrow and rigid focus on
one particular aspect of a language, language that is, rather, demonstrably
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malleable and related to a more complex representation of reading, one accessible to, controlled by and presented to an informed observer by the reader.
Often a programme’s interests distract a reader from, if not devalue, the work
and interests of the individual reader, most notably the reader constructively
confronting a challenging text that he or she values. How many teachers have
increased their focus on the apparent obviousness of a reader’s letter-sound
correspondence activity only to cut that reader off from their own thinking, or
have limited readers, by instructing them to look more closely at a word they
are saying out loud, by asking them to follow along with their fingers, in
effect covering oncoming text, or have told readers to point only to the word
they are orally producing? Like the International Teaching Alphabet (Downing,
1964, 1969), or the use of transformational grammar (Roberts, 1956) or any
of so many well-defined shortcuts to learning to read that have been and are
currently being tried, any silver-bullet skill-emphasis direct-instruction programme or linked assessment tool will no doubt go the way of history. Ali
shows us that she is an engaged constructor of meaning. For reading instruction
to be meaningful and effective for young children, the complexities of reading
must be understood by teachers and researchers, and that instruction must
reflect a view of reading that understands the activity of the reader.
Irrespective of the attempts to override children’s own practices in favour of
simplistic interpretations of reading, reading for meaning, for understanding,
will continue, maybe more so outside of school, but hopefully within.
Note
1. To view the video clip discussed in this paper, please email a request to
[email protected].
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