Miscue Analysis: A Comparative Study of Two Groups of Pupils in a Secondary School

This study made use of Miscue Analysis as a psycholinguistic approach to investigate the reading strategies of a group of English as a Second Language pupils from the National-Type Primary Schools and National Primary Schools who are currently in Sekolah Menengah Bandar Baru Seri Petaling in Kuala Lumpur. The Reading Miscue Inventory by Yetta Goodman and Burke (1972) was modified for data collection in this study. The main question addressed here is whether the National-Type Primary and the National Primary pupils make the same miscues in oral reading and if they do,to what extent do these miscues commensurate with their comprehension of the text as revealed in their retelling scores. The findings show that both the National-Type Primary (UTP) and the National Primary (NP) pupils primarily made miscues in this order; substitutions, omissions and insertions. The NTP pupils made more miscues than the NP pupils. Both groups of pupils relied heavily on graphophonemic cues when they fail to break a code with the syntactic and semantic cues. Their omissions of inflected plural and past tense endings showed that they were conscious of word-economy in processing text. However the NTP pupils were less efficient than the NP pupils in the use of reading strategies and were therefore weaker readers resulting in poorer comprehension. Age had a negative effect on the NTP pupils.

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