MISCUE ANALYSIS PAPER

Student Miscue Analysis

Morgan Bethke

Colorado Mountain College

November 15, 2016

Dr. Cristin Jensen Lasser

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Student Miscue Analysis

The story I used to assess my students’ reading fluency with was Isabelefant, A Fourth

Grade Friend, a typescript for recording miscues. This story was fictional, with three pages of

text and no images. I had previously confirmed with my mentor teacher that the text would be

appropriate and align with my small groups’ instructional level. My small group of students read

the first three paragraphs, which contained a total of 272 words.

The students I evaluated in my tutoring small group have all been identified as being

within the same reading level and are assessed weekly by the schools’ literacy specialist teacher

for reading fluency growth. All three students are fourth graders in Molly McGalliard’s English

Language Arts class at June Creek Elementary School. The results of their assessments can be

seen in the table below:

Summary
Table 1

Summary of Miscue

Student Meaning % Structure % Visual %

(Semantics) (Grammar) (Graphophonic)

SR 7/17 41 4/17 23.5 13/17 76.5

BR 3/17 18 3/17 18 13/17 76.5

AP 10/17 59 5/17 29 12/17 71

Reading

As the data above shows, all three students relied heavily on their visual cueing systems;

over half of all of their mistakes were made in this category. All three of the students seemed
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very calm and collected; I would attribute this to the fact that their weekly fluency assessment

followed a very similar procedure.

Looking further into the 17 mistakes SR made, 13 were visual, four were structure, and

seven were meaning. Not shown on the above table, were the two mistakes she made that did not

seem to align with any of the three cueing types. Instead of reading the word the, she read if, and

instead of reading the word talents, she read segaltels. Ironically, she had previously read the

word talents as tanels, earlier in that same text passage. Another common theme with the errors

SR made was the elimination or changing of word endings, for example: grader read as grade,

an read as a, am as a, and has as had. A possible reasoning for this may be because of the timed

fluency assessments she regularly participates in, where students try to read as many words as

they can within one minute.

BR very rarely strayed from visual cueing, which accounted for 13 of the 17 mistakes;

three mistakes were identified as meaning, and three as structure. Similar to SR, BR also showed

a pattern of eliminating the ending of words: graders read as grader, talents as talent, won’t as

won, and reading as read. I also noticed that she struggled with reading vowels when they were

in the middle of a big word, replacing it with the schwa sound, for example: mathematician read

as mathuhtician and grannyfant read as granuhfant. Not mentioned in Table 1, were the two

omission errors she made with the words a and her.

AP had the most variety with the cueing systems he used; 12 of the 17 errors were visual,

ten were meaning, and five were structure. Once again, the trend of word ending elimination

continued. AP read an as a, talents as talent, and graders as grader. His miscues also showed a

tendency to connect bigger unknown words to words he already knew, like: mathematician read

as mathmagician, situation as solution, and grannyfant as grandfath where he slowed himself

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down to not say the –er. AP also omitted the words with and their, which were errors not

provided in Table 1.

Retell

When I prompted SR to tell me as much as she could remember from the story she had

just read, she was only able to provide a basic amount of detail. She recalled the main character

and the main idea, but once she got to this point, I noticed she started to become a little nervous

and being that I forgot to turn the passage over, she looked down at it and was able to add more

then she potentially would have, to begin with. The order of the retell was not in chronological

order and seemed a little scattered, for example, “She wore a red dress that was pink and lucky.”

I could not tell if these mistakes were drawn from anxiety or just a weak comprehension of what

she just read. Being that SR worked on her phonetic awareness skills multiple times throughout

the week with a reading specialist, I questioned if the lack of focus on comprehension instruction

has attributed to her lack of confidence in being able to retell.

BR kept her retell relatively brief, but did a decent job of recalling key ideas. She was

able to tell the story in chronological order, identify the main idea and character. “Isafent was

excited because it was the first day of fourth grade and she hoped to impress her new teacher

with large fancy words,” (Personal Communication) this showed me that she was clearly able to

comprehend what she had read. There was an event that she left out from the end, which I could

have possibly prompted her further to see if she could add that to her retell or implemented

additional assessments to see if there was any consistency in leaving out the endings of passages.

AP was able to retell most of what he read, but also added in a few false details and it

was not always in chronological order. AP missed the detail about the lucky pink dress, which

was one thing both of the other students were quick to point out. Additionally, he never
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addressed the actual name of the main character, which I could possibly attribute to his inability

to pronounce it. He was able to recall that she was moving to a new school, but added that she

had moved from another country, which was never mentioned. I was curious if that was an

internal connections based on the demographics of his classmates, where new students are

usually from another country.

Instructional Considerations and Implications

Based upon my analysis of the results, all three students had identifiable strengths and

weaknesses. SR, BR, and AP were all very strong with implementing the visual cueing system so

I would use that as an introduction into strengthening the other types of cues. It would be

especially important for SR to see her strengths first, as she lacks confidence in her skill set. I

would want to build on the areas they have already mastered. To help work on the meaning cue

system, I would implement questioning, like Fountas and Pinnell (1996) mention, during the last

10 minutes of our guided reading group. Some potential questions would be, “Skip that word,

read the rest of the sentence, and then think about what word would fit there,” or “You said

_________. Does that make sense in the story?” (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). An additional

activity I would implement with SR and BR is Cloze sentences. They would be given a list of

sentences with blanks within them where they would be required to think of a word that makes

the most sense. Although AP did not get his highest score in meaning, I would not spend as

much time on this category with him, as I would with BR and SR because there scores were

much lower.

In order to build up all three students’ structure cueing system, the area they all scored

the lowest in, I would use intentional questioning during guided reading time and create

activities they could also practice on their own. The questioning Fountas and Pinnell (1996)
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suggest using, is similar to the questions used to build meaning, “You said ________. Does that

sound right?” as well as having me read a sentence to the students two different ways so that they

can determine which one sounds better. One possible activity the three students could work on is

sentence builders with examples and non-examples, for instance, students would be given word

cards in various verb tenses and they would choose which one fits accurately into the sentence

they build. I could provide this strategy in a variety of ways, for example, offering a word bank

with sentence stems or even a sentence with two words (saw/seen) and ask the students to circle

the correct one. Being that meaning and structure are similar I would intermittently provide

support and instruction using both cueing systems.

Conclusion

SR, BR, and AP are assessed regularly on their fluency and comprehension. This process

usually consists of a timed reading, accuracy monitoring, and a story retell. By conducting a

miscue analysis, I was able to obtain another piece of data that could potentially help with

building their accuracy and comprehension. All three of my students relied heavily on the visual

cueing system and would be able to strengthen their reading skills by working on strategies

aligned with meaning and structure cueing systems.

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References

AP. (2016, October). Miscue Analysis [Personal interview].

BR. (2016, October). Miscue Analysis [Personal interview].

Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children.

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Owen, D. (n.d.). Using Students' Reading Errors to Guide Instruction in Literacy Groups.

Retrieved October, 2016, from http://www.shcsc.k12.in.us/

SR. (2016, October). Miscue Analysis [Personal interview].