Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-s6l46 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T15:22:30.962Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What is a reading error?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2010

WILLIAM LABOV  and
BETTINA BAKER
WILLIAM LABOV*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
BETTINA BAKER
Affiliation:
Flagler College
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE William Labov, Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, 3600 Market Street, No. 800, Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: labov@comcast.net
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Early efforts to apply knowledge of dialect differences to reading stressed the importance of the distinction between differences in pronunciation and mistakes in reading. This study develops a method of estimating the probability that a given oral reading that deviates from the text is a true reading error by observing the semantic impact of the given pronunciation on the child's reading of the text that immediately follows. A diagnostic oral reading test was administered to 627 children who scored in the 33rd percentile range and below on state-mandated assessments in reading in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Atlanta, Georgia, and California elementary schools. Subjects were African American, European American, and Latino, including Latinos who learned to read in Spanish and in English first. For 12 types of dialect-related deviations from the text that were studied, the error rates in reading the following text were calculated for correct readings, incorrect readings, and potential errors. For African Americans, many of these potential errors behaved like correct readings. The opposite pattern was found for Latinos who learned to read in Spanish first: most types of potential errors showed the high percentage of following errors that is characteristic of true errors.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 735 - 757
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Baratz, S. S., & Baratz, J. C. (1970). Early childhood intervention: The Social Science Base of Institutional Racism. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 29–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baugh, J. (1983). Black street speech: Its history, structure and survival. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bayley, R. (1994). Consonant cluster reduction in Tejano English. Language Variation and Change, 6, 303–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, J., Goodman, K., & Marek, A. (Eds.). (1996). Studies in miscue analysis: An annotated bibliography. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.Google Scholar
Buck, J., & Torgerson, J. (2003). The relationship between performance on a measure of oral reading fluency and performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (Florida Center for Reading Research Technical Report No. 1). Tallahassee, FL: Florida Center for Reading Research.Google Scholar
Chall, J. (1996). Stages of reading development (2nd ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Filippatou, D. N. (2004). Miscue analysis: A classification and critique of research. Psychology: Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society, 11, 319–340.Google Scholar
Fought, C. (2003). Chicano English in context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., & Compton, D. L. (2004). Monitoring early reading development in first grade: Word identification fluency versus nonsense word fluency. Exceptional Children, 71, 7–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., Hosp, M. K., & Jenkins, J. R. (2001). Oral reading fluency as an indicator of reading competence: A theoretical, empirical, and historical analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5, 239–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., & Maxwell, L. (1988). The validity of informal reading comprehension measures. Remedial and Special Education, 9, 20–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Good, R. H. III, Simmons, D. C., & Kameʽenui, E. J. (2001). The importance and decision-making utility of fluency-based indicators of foundational reading skills for third-grade high-stakes outcomes. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5, 257–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, K. (1969). Analysis of oral reading miscues: Applied psycholinguistics. In Gollasch, F. (Ed.), Language and literacy: The selected writings of Kenneth Goodman (Vol. 1, pp. 123–134). Boston: Routledge & Kegan.Google Scholar
Goodman, K. S. (1965). Dialect barriers to reading comprehension. Elementary English, 42, 853–860.Google Scholar
Goodman, K. S. (1989). Whole-language research: Foundations and development. Elementary School Journal, 90, 207–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guy, G. (1980). Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion. In Labov, W. (Ed.), Locating language in time and space (pp. 1–36). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1965). Linguistic research on the non-standard English of Negro children. In Dore, A. (Ed.), Problems and practices in the New York City schools (pp. 110–117). New York: New York Society for the Experimental Study of Education.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1966). Some sources of reading problems. In Frazier, A. (Ed.), New directions in elementary English (pp. 140–167). Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1984). Field methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In Baugh, J. & Sherzer, J. (Eds.), Language in use (pp. 28–53). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall.Google Scholar
Labov, W., & Baker, B. (2000). The individualized reading manual. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, Linguistics Laboratory.Google Scholar
Labov, W., Baker, B., Bullock, S., Ross, L., & Brown, M. (1998). A graphemic–phonemic analysis of the reading errors of inner city children. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, Linguistics Laboratory. Retrieved March 1, 1999, from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~labov/papers/GAREC/GAREC.htmlGoogle Scholar
Labov, W., Cohen, P., Robins, C., & Lewis, J. (1968). A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City (Cooperative Research Report No. 3288, Vols. 1 and 2). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, Linguistics Laboratory.Google Scholar
Laing, S. P. (2002). Miscue analysis in school age children. American Journal of Speech–Language Pathology, 11, 407–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyon, R. G., & Kameenui, E. J. (1998). National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) research supports the America Reads Challenge. Retrieved January 6, 2005, from http://www.ed.gov/inits/americareads/nichd.htmlGoogle Scholar
O'Connor, R. E., White, A., & Swanson, L. (2007). Repeated reading versus continuous reading: Influences on reading fluency and comprehension. Exceptional Children, 74, 31–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, S. (1978). On dialect acquisition and communicative competence: The case of Puerto Rican Bilinguals. Language in Society, 7, 89–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reidel, B. W. (2007). The relation between DIBELS, reading comprehension, and vocabulary in urban first-grade students. Reading Research Quarterly, 42, 546–562.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rickford, J. (1999). African American Vernacular English: Features and use, evolution, and educational implications. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Santa Ana, O. (1992). Chicano English evidence for the exponential hypothesis: A variable rule pervades lexical phonology. Language Variation and Change, 4, 275–288.Google Scholar
Schwanenflugel, P. J., Meisenger, E. B., Wisenbaker, J. M., Kuhn, M. R., Strauss, G. P., & Morris, R. D. (2006). Becoming a fluent and automatic reader in the early elementary years. Reading Research Quarterly, 41, 496–522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singleton, C. (2005). Dyslexia and oral reading errors. Journal of Research in Reading, 28, 4–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stahl, S., & Heubach, K. (2005). Fluency oriented reading instruction. Journal of Literary Research, 47, 25–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanovich, K., Cunningham, A. E., & Freeman, D. J. (1984). Relation between early reading acquisition and word decoding with and without context: A longitudinal study of first-grade children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 668–677.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, W. A. (1970). Current issues in the use of Negro dialect in beginning reading texts. Florida FL Reporter, 8, 1.Google Scholar
Thomson, M. E. (1978). A psycholinguistic analysis of reading errors made by dyslexics and normal readers. Journal of Research in Reading, 1, 7–20. Published online November 1, 2005. Retrieved June 25, 2010, from http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119617766/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wald, B. (1981). Limitations on the variable rule applied to bilingual phonology: The unmerging of the voiceless palatal phonemes in the English of Mexican Americans in the Los Angeles area. In Sankoff, D. & Cedergren, H. (Eds.), Variation omnibus. Edmonton, AB: Linguistic Research.Google Scholar
Weldon, T. (1994). Variability in negation in African American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change, 6, 359–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, W. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W. (1974). Sociolinguistic aspects of assimilation: Puerto Rican English in New York City. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar