Misreading: A search for causes.
| Number | 124 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1972 |
| Drawer | 2 |
| Entry Date | 05/21/1998 |
| Authors | Shankweiler, D. & Liberman, I.Y. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | In Kavanagh, James F. & Mattingly, Ignatius G.(eds.) Language by ear and by eye; the relationships between speech and reading. (pp.293-317). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0124.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction] Because speech is universal and reading is not, we may suppose that the latter is more difficult and less natural. Indeed, we know that a large part of the early education of the school child must be devoted to instruction in reading and that the instruction often fails, even in the most favorable circumstances. Judging from the long history of debate concerning the proper methods of teaching children to read [Mathews 1966), the problem has always been with us. Nor do we appear to have come closer to a solution: we are still a long way from understanding how children learn to read and what has gone wrong when they fail. Since the child already speaks and understands his language at the time that reading instruction begins, the problem is to discover the major barriers in learning to perceive language by eye. It is clear that the first requirement for reading is that the child be able to segregate the letter segments and identify them with accuracy and speech. Some children undoubtedly do fail to learn to recognize letters and are unable to pass on to succeeding stages of learning to read; but, as we shall see, there are strong reasons for believing that the principal barriers for most children are not at the point of visual identification of letter shapes. There is no general agreement, however, about the succeeding stages of learning to read, their time course, and the nature of their special difficulties. In order to understand reading and compare it with speech, we need to look closely at the kinds of difficulties the child has when he starts to read, that is, his misreadings, and ask how these differ from errors in repeating speech perceived by ear. In this way, we may being to grasp why the link between alphabet and speech is difficult. In the extensive literature about reading since the 1890s there have been sporadic surges of interest in the examination of oral reading errors as a means of studying the process of reading acquisition. the history of this topic has been well summarized by Weber [1968], so need not be repeated here. We ourselves set out in many directions when we began our pursuit of errors and we regard our work as essentially exploratory. If we break new ground, it is not by our interest in error patterns nor even in many of our actual findings, but rather in the questions we are asking about them. Much of the most recent research on reading errors has examined the child’s oral reading of connected text [Goodman 1965, 1968; Schale 1966; Weber 1968; Christenson 1969; Biemiller 1970]. The major emphasis of these studies is therefore on levels beyond the word, though they are concerned to some extent with errors within words. None of these investigations asks what we believe to be a basic question; whether the major barrier to reading acquisition is indeed in reading connected text or whether it may be instead in dealing with words and their components. We are, in addition, curious to know whether the difficulties in reading are to be found at a visual stage or at a subsequent linguistic stage of the process. This requires us to consider the special case of reversal errors, in which optical considerations are, on the face of it, primary. Our inquiry into linguistic aspects of reading errors then leads us to ask which constituents of words tend to be misread, and whether the same ones tend to be misheard. We examine errors with regard to the position of the constituent segments within the word and the linguistic status of the segments in an attempt to produce a coherent account of the possible causes of the error pattern in reading. We think that all the questions we have outlined can be approached most profitably by studying children who are a little beyond the earliest stages of reading instruction. For this reason, we have avoided the first grade and focused, in most of our work, on children of the second and third grades of the elementary school. Though some of the children at this level are well on their way to becoming fluent in reading, a considerable proportion are still floundering and thus provide a sizable body of errors for examination. |
| Notes |
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