Miscue Analysis

In 1963, educator and reading researcher Ken Goodman walked into a primary classroom and asked individual children to read a whole story aloud. In response to a sentence in the text: A little monkey had it, one child read: “The little monkey had it.” Goodman was struck by the young reader’s knowledge of English determiners [Page 1175]to make such an error. With this and accumulated evidence from thousands of readers, Goodman discovered miscues and developed miscue analysis (MA) as a research tool. By the term miscue, he rejected the concept of error as a negative aspect of reading; rather, he defined it as a process of a reader making sense of a written text. Oral reading is not an accurate rendition of text, all readers ...