Oral reading errors and metalinguistic knowledge: a study of remedial readers in the Secondary school

Abstract

Both the oral reading errors and the metalinguistic knowledge of 52 eleven year old Secondary school remedial readers were investigated during 9 reading task/structured interview sessions.
The children read three texts which were of similar linguistic difficulty but which differed in terms of their 'accessibility': SELF-texts (based on the readers' oral language); PEER-texts (the 'self-generated' texts of their peers) and a CLASS-text passage from a typical class-reader. The results of the analyses performed on the children's REFUSAL, OMISSION, INSERTION, and SUBSTITUTION errors showed that reading accuracy and the pattern of errors on each type of text was very similar and that all the children were capable of utilising the graphic, semantic and syntactic cues provided by the
texts. However, the 'quality' of the SUBSTITUTION errors differed according to text-type and to reading ability. On the SELF and PEER-texts the errors of the 'Poorer' readers in the sample were, by and large, as 'good' as those of the 'Better' and 'Fair' readers whilst the CLASS-text performances showed the errors of the Poorer
readers to be qualitatively inferior to those of the other children.
These results were interpreted to suggest that, whilst the reading strengths and weaknesses of the children did not differ per Se, the strengths of the Poorer readers were the least 'portable' across texts of differing accessibility. The children's reported metalinguistic knowledge of their own problem-solving strategies showed evidence of a 'mismatch' between what they said they did when they encountered an 'unknown' word and what the analysis of their reading errors suggested they actually did. Readers seemed particularly unaware of their ability to make use of the linguistic context in solving 'difficult' words although their ability to do this was clearly indicated by the analysis of their errors.