| The study investigated the oral reading behaviors of twenty kindergarten children (12 boys and 8 girls) who learned to read before entering school. Although the subjects were reading books prior to kindergarten entry, classroom reading instruction was limited to the teaching of letters and letter sounds, with the exception of one subject who was allowed to read one hour per week. Mean age of the subjects was 6 years 4 months. Miscue analysis revealed that the subjects relied primarily on semantic and syntactic cues to process print. When the written language of the text was easily predictable, the subjects were less concerned with focusing on individual words or letters as they read, as revealed in their strategies of substituting real words (that varied graphically in a number of positions) without altering the meaning of the text, and omitting and inserting words that did not change the meaning of the text. When the subjects encountered text that was more difficult (words that were unfamiliar in addition to story content that was beyond their level of experience) their strategies for word identification changed. The fewer cues the subjects received from context, the more observant they became of individual words and letters in a passage, as revealed by the decrease of real word substitutions, omissions, insertions, and self-corrections. Although the subjects seldom attempted to process unknown words letter-by-letter when contextual clues failed, they would often break unknown words into known word parts. Nonword production, although rare, occurred primarily with unfamiliar words. The nonword substitutions often maintained the same grammatical function as the word in the text. The subjects' miscues and word recognition strategies were compared with the results of a previous study of first grade children who had been taught to read. Two popular theories of reading were discussed. Educational implications along with recommendations for future research were presented. |
