"Personal reading training" aka using miscue analysis with adults

One way to help students improve their reading is to help them become aware of what they are doing when they read. Ruth Davenport, in her excellent teaching resource, "Miscues, not Mistakes" offers a technique called "Over the Shoulder" miscue analysis.

I tried out Davenport's method in my developmental reading class in Fall term 2012 and found it eye-opening and useful.

My first hurdle was how to market the process to adults. Many of my students, I knew, had unpleasant associations from remedial reading interventions in K-12 years. I positioned myself as a personal trainer who would help them practice and gain strength in reading - renaming the process "personal reading trainings."

Here's the assignment I created to make this method part of the course, including explanation of the trainings and their purpose.

Here's the list of reading strategies I was teaching from that term, adapted from "Readers and Writers with a Difference," by Rhodes and Dudley-Marling.

I created a form I used to collect data during the personal reading trainings, which I will link to here, when I dig it out of my archived Moodle shell (argh).



What are miscues? 

When we read, we make sense of the text as we go along, and we do that by bringing our own knowledge and experience to what we are reading. Sometimes we read the words exactly as the author wrote them, and sometimes we change words as we read, in an effort to make sense of the text. This change might be harmless (no change in meaning) or it might change and distort the author's meaning.

The technical term for the changes we make is "miscues." To illustrate the difference between changes that don't change the meaning and changes that do, in Davenport's book she tells a true story of a man with a graduate degree in Business who reads the book Blueberries for Sal aloud to his young daughter. As he reads the story, he changes some of the words. Perhaps he read berry instead of blueberry, or mama bear, mama or the little bear's mother, instead of mother bear.

The question for a "personal reading trainer" listening to this reading would not be merely whether the reader changed the text. The question would be: did the reader change the meaning? And why did the reader change the text?

Each miscue offers a window into the reader's process of making sense of the text. So, for example, when the father read aloud to his daughter, he made many changes, but he didn't change the meaning. He naturally made the book more accessible to his daughter. Thus he made miscues, but not mistakes.