Miscue Analysis - Opposing Viewpoint

Opposing Viewpoint

Goodman's approach has been criticized by other researchers who favor a phonics-based approach, and present research to support their viewpoint. From this perspective, good readers use decoding as their primary approach to reading, and use context to confirm that what they have read makes sense. Good readers decode rapidly and automatically. Poor readers, who have not developed this fluency skill, use such strategies as drawing from context in combination with looking at the picture or using only some of the letters in the words to predict a word that would make sense in context. Studies have shown that even good readers can correctly guess words in context only one out of ten times.

When students look at pictures as a reference, a strategy that is encouraged by whole language proponents, they will sometimes stop at the unknown word, look at the picture or consider the overall meaning of the sentence, then say a word that makes sense in context, rather than use graphophonemic clues. With such an approach, a child may read "I see a bunny," when in fact the last word in the sentence might read as "rabbit." Using miscue analysis, a child would be credited for using a word that makes sense, even if such a word does not match the letters in the book. A teacher critical of this approach would note that the child did not use letter-sound correspondence to decode the word, and instead used the picture or context as a way to hypothesize what word makes sense in the text. Such a teacher would work with this child to make sure that he is paying attention to the letter-sound correspondence.

Critics of the phonics-based perspective point out that fluent readers are those who read both effectively and efficiently. They argue that to conceptualize fluent reading as involving a word-for-word match promotes an inefficient or slow and labored approach to reading. Fluent readers do not look at individual words but rather look at chunks of words and hypothesize approximately what the sentence says, slowing down to look at the word level only when, through self-monitoring, they realize their approximations or hypotheses about what the sentence says does not make sense. In fact, fluent adult readers miscue (or read something other than what the text says) 20–40% of the time. Reading in this way, as all fluent readers do, allows for efficient reading. Effective reading involves the ability to self-monitor and apply strategies such as phonics, looking at pictures, skipping words, or using synonym substitutions when coming to words that the reader does not know. In contrast to the argument that reduces the complexity of good reading to rapid and automatic decoding, this perspective acknowledges that all good readers come to words they do not know and constantly miscue, and that good reading is the ability to effectively solve problems that arise in reading through a range of strategies. As Pinnell and Fountas (1998) point out, English is a language made up of several distinct languages and therefore is not phonetically regular. Only about half of the words readers encounter can be efficiently decoded using phonetic knowledge. Therefore, a range of strategies are needed for effective reading.