Myth #5 -- Reading involves using
syntax and semantics cues to "guess" words, and good readers make many
"mistakes" as they read authentic text
Both of these claims are quite wrong,
but both are surprisingly pervasive in reading instruction (they are especially
influential at the pre-service level). The idea that good readers
use context cues to guess words in running text comes from a method of
assessment developed by Ken Goodman that he called "miscue analysis" (which
has given rise to the popular "running records" assessments). For
his dissertation, Goodman examined the types of mistakes that young readers
make, and drew inferences about the strategies they employ as they read.
He noticed that the children in his studies very often made errors as they
read, but many of these errors did not change the meaning of the text (e.g.
misreading "rabbit" as "bunny"). He surmised that the reason must
be that good readers depend on context to predict upcoming words in passages
of text. He further suggested that for good readers, these context
cues are so important that the reader only needs to occasionally "sample"
from the text (i.e. look at the words on the page) to confirm the predictions.
Children who struggle to sound out words, Goodman says, are over-depending
on the letter / word cues, and need to learn to pay more attention to the
semantic and syntactic cues.
Goodman's model, that eventually
gave rise to the "Three Cueing Systems" model of word recognition, is very
influential in reading instruction, but unfortunately, it has never been
supported by research evidence.
In fact, repeated studies have shown
that only poor readers depend upon context to try to "guess" words in text
-- good readers depend heavily upon the visual information contained in
the words themselves (i.e. the letter / word cues) to quickly and automatically
identify the word. Keith Stanovich has been especially critical of
the three cueing systems model because the predictions made by the model
are exactly the opposite of what has been observed in research studies.
Philip Gough and I addressed the
second claim and showed that, in fact, good readers almost never make any
mistakes at all when they read, which means the notion of conducting a
"miscue analysis" is somewhat suspect -- how can you perform a miscue analysis
when there are typically no miscues? We had over 400 students read
a passage of text from Ken Goodman's book "Phonics Phacts," and showed
that the modal number of mistakes made by these students was zero -- almost
all of the students read the passage flawlessly. To suggest that
good readers are correctly guessing the words in the passage with one-hundred
percent accuracy stretched the boundaries of credulity.
However, to be sure, we examined
how accurate people would be if they were forced to use semantics and context
as their only cues. We concealed the passage of text and asked students
to guess each of the words in a passage; after each guess, the correct
word was revealed, and students were asked to guess the next word.
This process was repeated for every word in the passage, so the students
always new the words leading up to the unknown word. We found that,
given unlimited time to ponder, students were able to correctly guess one
out of ten content words in the passage. That's a ninety percent
failure rate, as opposed to the zero percent failure rate seen in skilled
readers who were not forced to make guesses based on context.
It is clear that good readers depend
very heavily upon the visual information contained in the word for word
identification (what is commonly called the graphemic information or orthographic
information). The semantic and syntactic information are critical
for comprehension of passages of text, but they do not play an important
role in decoding or identifying words. Good readers make virtually
no mistakes as they read because they have developed extremely effective
and efficient word identification skills that do not depend upon semantics/context
or syntax. For good readers, word identification is fast, fluent,
and automatic -- it needs to be so that the their attention can be fully
focused on using semantics and syntax to comprehend the text.
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