Some reviews:
http://www.nifdi.org/resources/news/hem ... er-go-away
See also Spear-Swerling, L. (2006). The use of context cues in reading. LDOnline. Retrieved from
http://www.ldonline.org/spearswerling/11773
See also Wren’s piece at
http://www.balancedreading.com/3cue.html
Some quotes:
“Goodman (1976) assumes that the grapho-phonic system is only utilised when semantic and syntactic cues are unavailable, and that less skilled readers spend most of their time relying on the visual and sound properties to decode text. The findings of this study are more consistent with those researchers who have found that poorer readers have difficulty grasping letter-sound correspondence rules (e.g. Coltheart & Prior, 2006; Elderedge, 2005; Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling & Scanlon, 2004; Westwood, 2004; De Lemos, 2002; Adams, 1990). Therefore, children with poor letter-sound awareness skills are more likely to be reading below grade expectations. This was supported by the finding that children who are not reading in accordance with grade expectations appear to be relying significantly less on the visual and sound properties of text compared with their more skilled peers. It is possible that this is one aspect of their reading that is restricting their progress.
This study revealed that children who were reading at or above grade expectations were more likely to make use of graphic and phonic cues when they approached an unfamiliar word in a text. As has been suggested (e.g. De Lemos, 2002; Adams, 1990) the ability to decode graphic and phonic information is a reliable determinant of higher reading ability. Therefore, these findings suggest that Goodman and colleagues may have underestimated the role of the grapho-phonic cueing system and overestimated the role of the semantic and syntactic cueing systems in relation to differentiating reading ability”.
Through the use of Miscue Analysis, this study has demonstrated that Average and Above Average readers used the grapho-phonic cueing system, or letter-sound correspondence rules, to a greater extent than Below Average readers when faced with unfamiliar text. It has also been demonstrated that students have better control over syntactical cues when the text is easier for them. However, the use of the semantic cueing system was not significantly greater for any one reading ability group or any particular level of text difficulty. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that supports the critical contribution of phonics skills to grade appropriate reading and decoding more difficult texts”.
Beatty, L., & E. Care. (2009). Learning from their miscues: Differences across reading ability and text difficulty. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 32(3), 226-244. Retrieved from
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Learning% ... 0210520844
“The scientific evidence is simply overwhelming that letter-sound cues are more important in recognizing words than either semantic or syntactic cues.” (p.16).
Pressley, M. (1998). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching. New York: Guilford.
“In the world of practice, the widespread subscription to the belief system that the three-cueing diagram has come to represent has wreaked disaster on students and hardship on teachers. At the same time, it is the underlying cause of not insignificant distrust and ill-will between teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. Yet, while teachers widely believe that the lore of the three-cueing system is based on the best of current research, researchers are barely aware of its existence, nature, or influence. The lesson of the story is thus clear and urgent. We must work together to rebuild the bridge, socially and intellectually, between those involved in research and practice”0
Adams, M.J. (1998). The three-cueing system. In F. Lehr and J. Osborn (Eds.), Literacy for all: Issues in teaching and learning. New York: Guilford Press.
“Contextual guessing strategies are supported by the cueing systems model of word recognition which has no basis in reading science. According to this theory, students are said to use grapho-phonic cues, semantic or meaning cues, and syntax or contextual cues to recognize words. In practice, the emphasis is on anything but the links between speech sounds and spelling. Unfortunately, balanced literacy students are learning strategies that poor readers rely on, not what good readers know” (p. 20).
Moats, L. (2007). Whole language highjinks: How to tell when “scientifically-based reading instruction” isn’t. Retrieved from Thomas B. Fordham Institute website:
http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/public ... ts2007.pdf
“Researchers acknowledge that context is important in proficient reading. The question is when and how it is used. Our best conceptualization of the reading process suggests that context is used after a word is located in memory. It helps us determine which meaning is the one intended by the author. In our example, the word horse is unconsciously identified without resorting to context, but only through context could you know that the author intended to refer to an animal (as opposed to a clothes horse, a saw horse, or just horsing around). For beginning and struggling readers, however, context can play an additional role. Stanovich (1980) proposed a model suggesting that poor decoders attempt to use context not only to decide among multiple meanings but also to locate a word in memory in the first place. In other words, they rely on context to compensate for weak word recognition skills, but they soon discover that context is an unreliable crutch on which to lean.
Implications for effective practice
The evidence of research leads us to believe that miscue analysis can serve a useful but limited role in reading assessment. We suggest three main implications for effective practice. First, we recommend the continued use of error totals, based on informal reading inventories and running records, for the explicit purpose of deter mining a student's instructional and independent reading levels. This use allows teachers to guide students toward appropriate text selections. Established criteria dating as far back as Betts (1946) have proved reliable for this purpose. However, we cannot recommend the use of semantically acceptable miscue tallies, which lack a foundation in research.
Second, teachers should view meaningful miscues (like substituting pony for horse) as evidence of inadequate decoding skills, and not as an end result to be fostered. Because beginning readers will attempt to compensate for weak decoding by reliance on context, teachers should instruct them in how to use the graphophonic, semantic, and syntactic cueing systems to support early reading. This often takes the form of teacher feedback. When a child struggles to read a word, the teacher responds with prompts such as "What's the first sound?" "Is there a part of the word you know?" "You said_. Does that make sense?" We have placed the context prompt last for a reason? it should be the child's last resort, not the first. "A major failing" of instruction that places the three cueing systems on equal footing is that it ignores the fact that one of the systems "is more central and important" than the others (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989, p. 351).
Third, miscue analysis provides a look at a child's relative use of graphophonic and contextu al cues. Teachers should study miscues to monitor their students' progress toward relying more and more on decoding. Miscue analysis can do little, however, to identify skill needs in the area of word recognition, because those needs are not systematically assessed through oral reading and because they may be masked by reliance on context (Walpole & McKenna, 2006). Teachers have bet ter methods of assessing decoding skill needs” (p.379).
McKenna, M.C., & Cournoyer, M. (2007). Revisiting the role of miscue analysis in effective teaching. The Reading Teacher, (60)4 378-380.
“Scaffolding errors" (errors which accurately represented the initial and final letters but not the vowels of words, e.g., 'bat' for 'boat') were positively correlated with accurate word reading ability, whereas other responses such as non-phonological errors (such as 'milk' for 'lorry') were not correlated with accurate word reading ability. These results have also been broadly replicated in subsequent correlational studies (Laxon, Masterson, & Moran, 1994; Savage, 1998; Savage & Stuart, 1998; Stuart, 1990). Scaffolding errors – when an error shares some or most of the sounds of the target word (e.g., 'bark' misread as 'bank') is a strong predictor of reading success. Errors that retain meaning but not initial and final phonemes (“people” for “crowd”) were not correlated with accurate word reading ability.
Savage, R., Stuart, M. & Hill, V. (2001). The role of scaffolding errors in reading development: Evidence from a longitudinal and a correlational study. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 1-13.
“During reading, the decoding of words always takes place before the understanding of words, sentences or whole texts. Sophisticated eye movement and brain research [event related potential (ERP) studies] have convincingly demonstrated this. The eyes fixate on a word for about 250 milliseconds. During this time, a number of processes occur close together in time, but nevertheless, in a set sequence. The visual shape of each letter is recognised, each letter is translated into its sound equivalent, the sounds are assembled together to arrive at a mental sound equivalent for the whole word, and finally, the meaning of the word is accessed.
Semantic processing occurs last (e.g. Lee, Rayner & Pollatsek, 1999: Sereno, Rayner, & Posner, 1998; Perry & Ziegler, 2002). As readers become more adept, instead of letter-by-letter symbol-to-sound translation occurring in a series, it has been shown that this process speeds up, and gradually groups of letters, common spelling patterns, and high frequency words begin to be recognised all at once, in parallel (Aghababian & Nazir, 2000; Jared, Levy & Rayner, 1999).
Pictures and guessing play no part in any of the word reading processes that occur. Nor is the use of context among the processes that occurs during an initial eye fixation. Only after an initial eye fixation occurs, and only on the occasions where word meaning is in doubt, do the eyes regress back over the preceding text to use context as an aid to meaning. These particular regressions constitute a post reading strategy that may occur afterwards: in effect, a non-reading strategy used to confirm meaning, not to extract it in the first place”.
Macmillan, B. (2002). An evaluation of the Government's Early Intervention Initiative: The Early Literacy Support programme. Reading Reform Foundation Newsletter, 49.
Retrieved from
http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID= ... eNumber=49
“In another recent meta-analysis, Hattie (2009) found a moderate difference in effect size between code-based instruction and meaning-based instruction. Hattie summarized 14 meta-analyses involving 6,000 students and found that code- based instruction had a medium effect (average effect size 0.60). He summarized four meta-analyses of meaning-based instruction teaching involving over 600 students and found, by way of contrast, that meaning-based instruction had an almost nil effect size (average effect size 0.06). To give an idea of the difference you could argue that meaning-based instruc- tion teachers would have to work ten times as hard as code-based instruction teachers to get the same results. Other meta-analyses support Hattie’s conclusion (Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001; Torgerson, Brooks, & Hall, 2006). Hattie concluded about code-based instruction that, “Overall, phonological instruction is powerful in the process of learning to read, both for reading skills and for reading comprehension” (p. 134), and for meaning-based instruction that, “In summary, meaning-based instruction programs have negligible effects on learning to read, be it on word recognition or on comprehension. Such methods might be of value to later reading but certainly not for the processes of learning to read; it appears that strategies of reading need to be deliberately taught, especially to students older, struggling to read” (p. 138). …
These studies have showed positive results for phonological recoding instruction (which is what the term “decoding” refers to in this introduction) but it still leaves open the question of whether or not the use of meaning-based instruction would be just as effective as phonological recoding instruction for older, struggling readers. It is an empirical question, though many practitioners think that a meaning-based tutoring program is unlikely to be effective with very poor readers because of the average poor reader’s reliance on contextual strategies to guess unknown words, a strategy that holds them back, compared with good readers, who have much better word recognition skills, good enough for them to use context clues productively for decoding, something poor readers are unable to do any- where near as well (Stanovich, 1986; Juel, 1988, 1994; Tunmer & Chapman, 1999; Nicholson, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1991; Nicholson & Tunmer, 2011; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011).
Nicholson, T. (2011). Theme editor’s summary. The International Dyslexia Association Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 37(4), 7-14.
“A child who has difficulty decoding some words may still be assessed as making effective use of visual information if there is any visual connection between the child’s errors and the correct words” (p. 248). Regardless of the quality of any reading errors, teachers should still recognize (when analyzing running records) that word reading errors are by definition, still incorrect responses and therefore, the problem should be viewed first and foremost, as one of inadequate decoding. In support of this concern (even when errors retain full meaning), McKenna and Picard (2006) also note that “teachers should view meaningful miscues (like substituting pony for horse) as evidence of inadequate decoding skills and not as an end result to be fostered” (p. 399).
Greaney, K.T. (2011). The multiple cues or “Searchlights” word reading theory: Implications for Reading Recovery®. The International Dyslexia Association Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 37(4), 15-21.
McKenna, M. C., & Picard, M. (2006/2007). Does miscue analysis have a role in effective practice? The Reading Teacher, 60, 378–380.
”80% of the preservice teachers and 74% of the inservice teachers agreed that the most beneficial strategy for identifying an unknown word was to use the context to figure it out. Both groups agreed that a teacher should not be concerned when early readers' miscues do not alter meaning (76% preservice; 79% inservice). Only 22% of the preservice and 36% of the inservice teachers recognized that phonological awareness involves oral language and is not a method of reading instruction.
Mather, N., Bos, C., & Babur, N. (2001). Perceptions and knowledge of preservice and inservice teachers about early literacy instruction. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 34, 472-482.
Research has found that readers make extensive use of visual information. Skilled readers do this with great speed and efficiency, perhaps giving the impression that they are only sampling the text. In reality, however, they are processing nearly all of the available visual information (Adams, 1990). Beginning readers who pay attention to print detail are likely to show higher progress than children who depend on meaning and structure cues (Biemiller, 1979; Nicholson, 1993). Encouraging children to attend to visual information assists their reading because “the most effective way to become automatic with a particular word is to initially decode it – to consciously process both the letter patterns and the sounds the first few times it is read” (Honig, 2001, p. 63).
Biemiller, A. (1979). Changes in the use of graphic and contextual information as functions of difficulty and reading achievement level. Journal of Reading Behavior, 11, 307-318.
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press.
Honig, B. (2001). Teaching our children to read (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Nicholson, T. (1993). The case against context. In G. B. Thompson, W. E. Tunmer, & T. Nicholson (Eds.), Reading acquisition processes (pp91-104). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.