The relation between oral reading miscue patterns and comprehension: A test of the relative explanatory power of psycholinguistic and interactive views of reading

The use of oral reading to assess silent reading ability has gained wide acceptance despite the lack of definitive evidence that the two processes are similar. Moreover, there are a number of theoretical positions that run counter to assumptions underlying oral reading error analysis as a measure of silent reading competency. This study examined the relation between multiple oral reading miscue measures and postreading comprehension performance. Correlations between the oral reading and comprehension measures indicated a negative relation between oral reading and recall following the reading of familiar passages and a positive relation between oral reading and an inferential comprehension measure following the reading of unfamiliar passages. In addition, when the subjects read disrupted passages, their attempts at correcting incongruous errors and their self-report interviews indicated that their oral reading was not related to their performance on comprehension product measures. The results, which are discrepant with previous research relating oral reading to comprehension, are discussed in terms of a comparison between psycholinguistic and interactive models of reading comprehension.