Kyungjin Hwang

University of South Carolina

A Case Study of an EFL Reader: Using Miscue Analysis and Retrospective Miscue Analysis for Teaching Reading

In Korea, English has been taught as a required subject, but as a university freshman, KH still struggles to read English books. In interviews, she says that English texts are too difficult to understand, and she has no reading strategy to identify the meaning of unknown words. Thus, this case study aims to improve the reading skills of the EFL learner using Miscue Analysis (MA) and Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) and help to become a confident and independent English reader. 

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols to derive meaning. It is also a language process because readers use four language levels simultaneously: graphophonic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatics to construct meaning (K. Goodman, 2005). Success in this process is measured as reading comprehension. Hence, the study of readers’ miscues provides insights into how they integrate the language cueing systems to understand the text. Reading is also a socio-psycholinguistic process (Smith, 2012). This view asserts that readers actively construct the meaning of the text through background knowledge and reading strategies such as sampling, predicting, confirming, and inferring.

A miscue is any variation that readers make from the text. MA is a running record and review of the miscues to define a pattern of reading process and strategies during reading. It also provides procedures to help teachers find out information about how students use language cueing systems and a clearer picture of what kinds of instruction they need. RMA involves readers talking about the miscues they made during oral reading (Y. Goodman et al., 2014). Discussing miscues with a teacher helps readers become more confident in reading. Through RMA, readers can keep track of their own meaning-making process and view their miscues as potentials, not mistakes. The implication of this study is that it presents a specific method to teach English reading to EFL readers.

​

I’m currently a second-year graduate student studying for a Ph.D. in language and literacy program at University of South Carolina, the United States of America. I am interested in the policies of Korean English education, and English teaching and learning in Korean schools based on my personal experience of an English teacher at Korean secondary school. In addition, I also study about language ideology, reading and writing education, miscue analysis, bilingualism and multimodality.