Cues Goodman

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2005 37: 1Journal of Literacy ResearchKen Goodman

Making Sense of Written Language: A Lifelong Journey

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Journal of Literacy Research | v37.1

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Making Sense of Written Language: A Lifelong Journey

The invitation from the editors of the Journal of Literacy Research to join other Oscar Causey Award winners in contributing a Viewpoints article coincided with my review of over four decades of correspondence — start-ing with 1962, the year I completed my doctorate at UCLA and joined the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit.

So many of my interests, contacts, struggles, ideas, arguments, and achievements are represented in this old paper trail. It’s like reading my autobiography. I’ve unearthed a letter from a young Dave Pearson asking for help in getting published. I’ve also found correspondence with Frank Smith that led to a joint article for the Elementary School Journal, our only formal collaboration (Goodman & Smith, 1971).

There are successful research proposals, unsuccessful research proposals, and proposals that were accepted but not funded. I’d forgotten that back in the 1970s, I turned down an invitation to write for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Here’s the letter I wrote to Scott Foresman ending our relationship when their leadership and publication policy went one way and I went another. It took months of correspondence with Garth Boomer in Australia and Marie Clay in New Zealand to arrange an extended tour of Australian schools and universities and IRA councils in New Zealand. All of these are the sorts of matters I now routinely handle over e-mail.

The Internet is wonderful for talking with colleagues half a world away, but there is no paper trail unless e-mails are printed out and filed. Many electronic trails have been lost in the memories of long-abandoned com-puters and discs whose format is no longer accessible to me. That has been the fate of Internet arguments with Reid Lyon and Barbara Foorman and her colleagues.

Ken Goodman | University of ArizonaPages 1-24

Ken Goodman



Making Sense of Written Language

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Once I asked Emilia Ferreiro which of Jean Piaget’s works I should read to get a full sense of his ideas. Her advice was to read the last one because it represented a lifetime of learning and thinking. While that’s true, it is also useful to look at how ideas developed over time and how they changed in response to events and interactions with others in each period. But that’s not easy to do with one’s own work. I sometimes try to figure out when I first expressed a particular concept and how my emphasis and influences changed over time.

At a conference I once attended, Hermione Sinclair-de-Swart (a.k.a. Mimi Sinclair), a long-term colleague of Jean Piaget, was asked to contrast Piaget’s work with Vygotsky’s. She said it was important to understand against whom each was fighting during their careers. I was reminded of some my own persistent conflicts in my reading through my correspondence files.

Sometimes my work is cited in a way that makes me think the writer has no sense of time and development. For example, a tentative first try at a graphic representation of the reading process I published in 1965 was in-cluded 20 years later in an article by a writer as if it represented my then-current thinking. On the other hand, professors commonly tell students they can’t use citations that are more than five years old. So I often see my work cited as part of a more recent publication by another writer who has misrepresented what I’ve said. I’m not surprised at being misunderstood and/or misrepresented because my own view of comprehension is that it is as much a product of what the reader brings to the text as what the author has tried to say through the text.

In extreme cases, I find that a misrepresentation is cited often enough that it comes to represent my views, even though it is actually inconsistent with them. One such case of conflated misrepresentation is that of the research reported in 1965 of my first exploration of the reading process, which initi-ated 40 years of miscue research. It was published in Elementary English as “Cues and Miscues in Reading” (Goodman, 1965a). An incidental finding of that small, unfunded study, which was later referred to as “classic,” was that young readers could read in context most of the words they couldn’t read in lists of isolated words. Though at the time neither I nor most of the teachers who knew of the results were surprised, several researchers subsequently claimed to have conducted experiments that disproved my




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conclusion that context was important in reading — despite the fact that decades of miscue research followed that early study.

In this article I will examine the major concepts that have characterized my work over the 40-plus years of my career to date. I want to give some sense of how my understanding developed and particularly who and what influenced my work and how I used these influences. I will summarize my current understandings and beliefs. Finally, I will discuss the work cur-rently being performed by myself and others that is shaping the future of these understandings and beliefs.

Pragmatic PurposeEarly in my career I decided to study the reading process using concepts of linguistics and later psycholinguistics. My goal was to develop an un-derstanding of how people learn to read. Knowledge gleaned from studying how people made sense of print and how they learned to do so provided a base from which to build an understanding of what we are trying to do when we teach people how to read.

I made a decision early in my career to use the research funding I was able to generate to support graduate students and encourage them to undertake studies that extended and carried out these objectives, often using the da-tabase developed through the funded studies. They learned from me, but I also learned from them. And together we produced an expanding body of related research (Brown, Goodman, & Marek, 1996). Students have carried the work into studying literacy in a variety of languages and orthographies. And my former students and others have developed new research method-ologies to combine with miscue analysis.

Miscue Analysis: Windows on the Reading ProcessMiscue analysis is the major research tool I developed, starting with the early study mentioned above. We had readers read whole texts orally and compared their oral reading with what they were expected to read. That gave us a continuous series of observed responses to compare to the ex-pected responses that an oral reader would produce. I defined miscues as mismatches between expected and observed responses. My assumption from the beginning was that these miscues were never simply random but




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involved use of the same cues available to the reader as expected responses in the transaction with the text and thus could give me a window into how the reader made sense of print. Because the data involved whole texts of several hundred words, and because even relatively proficient readers produced numerous miscues, I could develop a profile of a reader in one session and a large database to compare readings across readers of the same text or across texts read by the same reader.

The development of a model and theory of the reading process that was tested and refined through miscue analysis in turn helped to refine miscue analysis as a research tool. My work was never without its opponents. I found myself a focal point of the attack on whole language in the “reading wars,” as they were characterized in the national press beginning in the mid-1990s (Goodman, 1998).

My wife, Yetta Goodman, did one of the first miscue dissertations, a lon-gitudinal study of six beginning readers (Goodman, 1971). Looking at how children developed as readers led to her lifelong study of early development in both reading and writing. That research applied the theory of the read-ing process and was instrumental in formulating a companion theory of literacy development.

Yetta and Carolyn Burke, and later Dorothy Watson, took miscue analy-sis and extended it from a research tool to the Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI), which teachers could use to examine their students’ reading and which teacher educators could use in helping teachers understand the reading process (Goodman, Watson, & Burke, 1987). The RMI, in turn, became a research tool in numerous studies of the reading process and reading development (Brown et al., 1996).

Curriculum and Whole LanguageThroughout our careers, we brought the understandings we were develop-ing to teachers in our writing and staff development work. In Language and Thinking in School, E. Brooks Smith and I developed a language-centered curriculum focusing not only on how to develop language and literacy but also on the role of language in human thought, communication, and learn-ing (Goodman & Smith, 1987).




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Teachers took our findings and the holistic perspective of the research and incorporated them into whole language, a pedagogy which became a grass roots movement that passed from teacher to teacher from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. In What’s Whole in Whole Language, I examined this movement and attempted to identify the knowledge base on which the movement is built (Goodman, 1986). Over a decade, the book sold over 250,000 copies in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese.

My Work Over the DecadesAs I said earlier, it’s not easy to examine my own work over the course of its development. In 2003, two of my former doctoral students, Alan Flurkey and Jingguo Xu, put together a selected collection of my writing entitled On the Revolution in Reading (Goodman, Flurkey, & Xu, 2003). Professor Henrietta Dombey of Brighton University in England published an extensive essay review of that book in the Journal of Curriculum Studies (Dombey, 2004). Her review provides an insightful perspective on my work and its influences and development, as well as the responses it has evoked over the years. Here’s how she begins her review:

For decades, together with his colleague and wife Yetta, Kenneth Goodman has been lionized and vilified by literacy educators and education decision makers on both sides of the Atlantic. It is unusual for scholars as careful and thorough to evoke such responses. However, literacy in general and literacy education in particular are highly political and contentious issues. Those who make connections, as Goodman does, between literacy activities in the classroom and the power of the individual in the wider liter-ate society are entering hotly-contested ground. (p. 1)

She then puts this conflict into a broad political context:All over the anglophone world, especially in the Northern hemi-sphere, education in general and literacy education in particular have been straitened in recent years by governmental insistence on measurable outcomes and the imposition of targets, largely predicated on a limited and instrumental view of literacy… .

Ken and Yetta Goodman have given us “kidwatching” and made it evident that there really is no substitute for examining the




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reading process in action, not taken away from real-life contexts to a laboratory setting or reduced to the fragmentary abstractions of the usual kind of reading test, but the whole process, in its nor-mal functional context, where readers engage with text to make sense of it. …Tests composed of nonsense syllables, single words, unconnected sentences, or literal “comprehension” questions on longer passages cannot … be counted as tests of reading … . (p. 2)

Seminal InfluencesDombey’s review helps me see the seminal influences I drew on as my own ideas developed. I began using concepts of descriptive linguists, particu-larly Charles Fries, in understanding the role syntax plays in reading (Fries, 1963). But very early on my work began to reflect the influence of Noam Chomsky and his concept of deep and surface structure (Chomsky, 1975):

If reading a text is arriving at its deep structure, then what matters is helping the child achieve the most efficient and effective route to this deep structure, which, says Goodman, certainly doesn’t involve identifying every letter, and often not every word. (p. 3)

A timely direct encounter with Chomsky played a pivotal role in my de-veloping view of reading. At Jeanne Chall’s suggestion, I spent a month in 1967 at Project Literacy at Cornell University. Chomsky spent three days with the small group of researchers, which psychologist Harry Levin had assembled under an early federal research grant. Chomsky suggested that reading involved “tentative information processing.”

Shortly after I returned home, I wrote “Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game” (Goodman, 1967). As with many of the important sources I built on, I didn’t base my work in any direct sense on Chomsky’s presentation. Rather, his concept helped me formulate and refine my own concept of reading as a process of constructing meaning from written language.

Similarly, Chomsky’s concept of language competence underlying lan-guage performance became very important in my theories. But where Chomsky believed that language competence is innate, I used this dif-ference between competence and performance to refute the behaviorist view that the goal of education is to change behavior. I believe the role of education is to build underlying competence. In many areas, behaviorists




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have confused overt behavior with the competence that makes overt per-formance possible. So correct answers to questions are assumed to prove that learning has occurred, whereas they may simply be rehearsed for a test and quickly lost.

Throughout my career, I have rejected behaviorist psychology, but none-theless have drawn useful insights from cognitive psychologists such as Bruner, the psychogenesis of Jean Piaget, and his colleagues — particularly Ferreiro (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982) — and Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1962).

Dombey found this Piagetian (Piaget, 1970) influence in my early work:In Piaget’s work, he found more congenial ideas … particularly in the concept of children’s progress through states of disequilibrium and equilibrium, achieved through the processes of assimilation, accommodation, and adaptation. These ideas allowed a view of literacy learning as an active process in which children are forever striving to make their worlds more predictable and manageable, as they focus their mental energies on making sense of texts. Good-man was also much influenced by Piaget’s respect for the power of play as a context for learning. (p. 5)

I also built on Vygotsky’s recognition of the importance of play in children’s learning. Vygotsky says (1978) in Mind in Society:

The best method (for teaching reading and writing) is one in which children do not learn to read and write but in which both these skills are found in play situations. In the same way as chil-dren learn to speak, they should be able to learn to read and write. (p. 118)

Dombey recognized that I found Vygotsky’s emphasis on learning as social very helpful but that his influence came into my work after I had already been influenced by the work of Halliday, who strongly emphasizes the so-cial aspects of language development (Halliday, 1975).

From Piaget’s view of the learner making sense of the world and Vygotsky’s view of learning as the internalization of social knowledge, Yetta and I built a view of language learning as personal invention within the social context. Language is shaped by two opposing forces at work, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces in physics. Personal invention expands




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language outward to express new experiences and ideas, but the need to be understood by others pulls language back into the conventions of the language of the community (Goodman & Goodman, 1992).

Halliday’s work also helped me to frame another important concept. From miscue analysis I identified three cuing systems in language, which I labeled graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic. I found readers using these three systems simultaneously. As I became more aware of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistic theories, I realized that these were essen-tially the three language strata Halliday (1975) identifies as symbolic, lexico-grammatical, and semantic.

Halliday came to the University of Arizona as part of a weekend course we developed to bring important scholars to our graduate students. In his pre-sentation he talked about wording as the process by which a reader chooses the particular words in an utterance at the same time that the grammati-cal choices are made. That’s why he calls his middle layer of language the “lexico-grammar.”

Dombey recognizes the influence of Halliday in another aspect of my work:From Halliday and the school of systemic linguistics that has grown up around him, Goodman takes the powerful conception of language as essentially functional. … Halliday sees language as performing a range of functions for us. So we learn language not just because we are programmed to do so, but because of what it can do for us.

Goodman argues that the acquisition of written language should be seen as expanding the user’s linguistic range and effectiveness. Children must be put in a position to feel certain needs if they are to seek actively to develop the related forms … . (p. 6)

Dialects and ReadingFrom the beginning of my miscue research my subjects included a wide range of social classes and ethnic groups. That’s because I wanted my findings to be applicable to all learners and not just those from white, middle-class backgrounds. My subjects spoke a wide range of American dialects. In a major study I looked at eight different populations — four that




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spoke different American dialects and four that spoke English as a second language. In this I drew on the sociolinguists who were studying dialect differences, like Roger Shuy (1967) and William Labov (1980).

Because I studied reading in different language communities I was able to learn a lot about dialects and how they influenced reading. I started considering that dialects might create barriers to reading com-prehension (Goodman, 1965b). But after studying the miscues of several different dialect groups, I concluded that it was not the dialect but teach-ers’ rejection of learners’ dialects that led to reading problems (Goodman & Buck, 1973).

The views of the great Brazilian educator Paolo Freire also helped shape the understandings I drew from my research. Freire (1993) contrasted “bank-ing education,” which treated education as depositing knowledge in the heads of learners, with “liberatory education,” which frees the minds of learners from artificial school constraints and empowers them to learn.

Passionate Responses to a Passionate ResearcherI was once criticized in response to an RRQ (Goodman, 1970) article I’d written as not being sufficiently dispassionate. So I began to call myself “the passionate researcher.”

Dombey summarizes the reasons why my work has led to “passionate” responses. She lists traditional beliefs my work has challenged:

• the conception of the learning and teaching of reading as straightforward, orderly processes, proceeding through a hierar-chy of skills from small, simple units (letter/sound relationships) to larger, more complex units;

• the idea that one’s competence as a language-user can be devel-oped by focusing on the component parts of a text;

• the idea that to read well one must attend to every word and ev-ery letter;

• the underlying assumption that control over form must precede control over function;

• the view that the teacher should be in charge of the student;




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• the view that a centrally devised program should direct the teacher; and

• the view that the goal of the process is to fit individuals into the existing social structure. (p. 8)

Political DistractionsAll of these traditional beliefs have been incorporated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This puts me in the company of other marginalized scholars of the past. I take comfort in these words of Galileo:

I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences.

Letter to Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo Galilei, 1615 (Sobel, 1999)

I didn’t place miscues in the reading of those I studied. I found them there and learned from them. On Reading (Goodman, 1996) was written for teachers and educationists as a fairly complete view of what I have learned about reading. But on the way to writing that book I felt compelled to write another book, Phonics Phacts (Goodman, 1993). My purpose in writing that book was to set out what I had learned from my research about the relationships between the oral and written systems of alphabetically writ-ten languages like English and how I believe developing readers come to control these relationships. I find that in writing, as in teaching, I learn more about the topics I am focusing on. Two key insights became clear to me as I wrote Phonics Phacts:

1. Phonics is personal. Each speaker of a language has a unique phonology within the shared phonology of a dialect. But languag-es standardize the orthography (spelling and punctuation) across dialects in print. So phonics is the set of relationships between someone’s phonology and the orthography of the language. Your phonics and mine are as different as our personal phonologies.




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My help may be your he’p or someone else’s hey-ulp but we all spell the word H-E-L-P.

2. Language is possible because human beings have a set for ambi-guity. We think symbolically, but we can assign different sym-bolic values to a single symbol in different contexts and we can assign the same value to different symbols in different contexts. If we didn’t have this set for ambiguity we would all need to speak or write in exactly the same way. Because we have this set for ambiguity we can make sense of variable handwriting and a myriad of different fonts. If language had to be used in a single exact way to be understood it could not change and grow to express new experiences and understandings. And change is the only true constant in language.

Much of my work in the last decade was focused on the political attacks on teachers, teacher educators, educational researchers, whole language, and public education launched in “the reading wars.” I wrote In Defense of Good Teaching (Goodman, 1998) to refute claims that there was a na-tional crisis in literacy and that it resulted from the growing popularity of whole language.

I decided to fight with my pen and my voice against the mandates being imposed on literacy education in many states, most notably California and Texas, which culminated in the Reading Excellence Act and the subse-quent NCLB mandates. With others, I gathered facts about the realized and potential effects of NCLB in the book Saving Our Schools (Goodman, Shannon, Goodman, & Rapoport, 2004). I hoped the book could help par-ents and educators understand that NCLB and its iterations were designed not to improve education and access to literacy, but to make public schools appear to be failing and therefore encourage privatization.

With the help of former graduate students and others, I have been moving forward in my lifelong goal of understanding how written language works. I will now address my current thinking and the work informing it.

Scientific RealismAs a graduate student at UCLA, I minored in educational philosophy. As a result, I was able to place myself as a social realist — I believe in a reality




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independent of its knowers and that human society is part of this reality. I also believe that social communities as well as individuals form views of the real world, and that as we grow up we come to share our community’s view of reality. Whorf (1956) and others have demonstrated that as we learn the language of our community, we also learn how the community views the world.

I also found that I am something of a reconstructionist. I believe the goals of education should extend beyond passing on culture to young people and socializing them into useful roles in society. Schools need to prepare people to improve — to reconstruct — a better world than the one they inherit from prior generations.

Much later I recognized that my research paradigm fits into scientific real-ism. I don’t want to imply that I examined all alternatives in each area and then chose among them. Rather, I realized the paradigm into which my be-liefs fit after I had already formed them. Discovering a paradigm also made it possible to not only examine the choices I’d made, but those I’d rejected. It also made it possible to examine the consistency of my own position.

In my research I didn’t reject the experimental method; I simply found it inappropriate for the questions I was asking. The experimental method re-quires researchers to reduce the reality they are studying to controlled vari-ables. Real language is irreducible; it is no longer real if it is controlled in order to study it. Experimental research requires hypotheses to be stated in advance and then tested through a controlled design. At best, one can only support and test the parameters of what one already knows. I wanted to generate hypotheses, not test them. The reality of language is that it exists only in the process of its use. So I studied readers in the act of reading.

One key insight in my work that comes from examining reading in use is the distinction I make between comprehension and comprehending. Comprehension is always the product of what the reader knew before the reading and what was learned during the reading; comprehending is the process of constructing new meaning during the reading of a text. So meaning doesn’t reside in the writer’s text but is constructed during the transaction between the reader and the text. In miscue analysis we sampled comprehension through a retelling by the reader. We developed a




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comprehending score by calculating the percent of miscues that were fully semantically acceptable, with no loss of meaning, and adding miscues suc-cessfully corrected.

Readers do not passively receive information as they read, but construct meaning; they are engaged in comprehending. The text the reader reads is real but it is changed through the transaction the reader has with it. So during reading readers actively construct their own texts parallel to the text the author has constructed. This self-constructed reader’s text, paral-lel to the published text of the writer, is what the reader comprehends.

In scientific realism there is a continuous relationship between theory and reality. The job of the scientist is not to find simple causal relationships in reduced and controlled contexts. It is to build a theory of the underly-ing structures and processes of the reality being studied and then to test that theory against the reality again. In doing so, the theory changes and improves but there are always new layers of reality revealed. The more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to be known. In that sense, the research methodology also becomes more sophisticated and complex and new methodologies are needed to dig into the layers of reality exposed. Eventually, I came to understand that key decisions that I had been making in building miscue analysis as a research methodology were consistent with scientific realism.

Sharing the Reality of Reading with TeachersThere is an added bonus to studying reading in the process of its use. Teachers recognize that what we’ve learned is observable in their own classrooms because developing readers transact with real texts rather than those artificially constructed for instructional purposes.

In my classes and in staff development with teachers, I have found that one of the best ways to help them understand reading phenomena is to involve them in informal study of themselves as readers. For this purpose, I’ve developed protocol materials that quickly and easily involve them in language processing, which they can then examine and discuss. Each time I involve teachers in a self-study of themselves as readers, we are conduct-ing an informal experiment.




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Experimental Studies That Examine Hypotheses Generated Through Miscue Analysis

These informal experiments have led to more formal research studies. Several doctoral studies have taken the hypotheses generated by miscue studies and the protocols we’ve used with teachers and turned them into experiments.

John Woodley redid a protocol I’d been calling “lines of print” and used it in a more formal experimental study for his dissertation (Woodley, 1984). In my version, I had lines of print on a page that ranged from a line of vaguely geometric figures to the full English sentence, “Can you read this?” I also included a full sentence in Hebrew, a line of numerals, a line of letters, and a line of both numerals and letters. One line consisted of a real word; another line was a slightly misspelled word.

I flashed one line at a time on a screen using an overhead projector. My instructions after each line were: Write down everything you remember seeing. The results predictably form a very strong pattern: They support George Miller’s famous “five plus or minus two” finding about memory from his perceptual research (Smith, Miller, & United States Human Communication Program, 1966). In general, respondents could recall and reproduce between three and seven of the characters at the left of each line. They found certain lines very hard: the geometric shapes and the Hebrew. They found certain lines very easy: The meaningful sentence was perceived and understood instantly by virtually all. Very rarely, a few in an audience would find the line of Hebrew equally easy. They were, of course, people who knew and read Hebrew. I could easily make the point with my audiences that with the same access to perceptual information, a sentence was easier to read than a word, which is easier to read than patterned nonsense, etc. I also could demonstrate that they did not reproduce what they saw. Though my line included a closed “4” they consistently wrote an open one, the kind they would usually produce themselves.

Woodley made several changes: He put the lines in random order to avoid any cumulative effect. He used a tachistoscope to reduce and control the exposure and eliminate fadeout. He redid some lines. For example, my line of random numerals became this in his version: 149162536496481. Can you find the pattern? (They’re the first nine numbers squared.) He




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reasoned that anyone who discovered the pattern would be able to repro-duce the whole line. He also included some Spanish-like nonsense.

The results from his experiment were totally predictable, given my earlier results, but the effect was sharper. There was a clear, virtually invariant or-der of recall difficulty for the lines in his version. His conclusion supported and extended mine: What we can perceive and our ability to make sense of it depends on what we bring to the task and our ability to apply schemas to the perceptions.

Error Detection Another experiment using one of my instructional protocols and replicated with a experimental study in Chinese reading is summarized in Scientific Realism in Studies of Reading (Goodman, Flurkey, & Paulson, in press).

To demonstrate that reading is not a process of accurately identifying every word, I wrote a one-paragraph story called “The Boat in the Basement.” It’s the old story of the man who builds a boat in his basement only to discover when he finishes that it’s too big to get out. In my version, however, I’ve included several deliberate errors. I put it on a screen from a transparency and instruct my respondents to read it through once, and once only, with no regressions, and then write down everything they remember reading. Virtually no one catches all of the errors. Some notice none. Few people are aware of more than three. I use this to demonstrate that we focus on making sense of what we read and do not use all of the visual information to do so.

Fred Gollasch (1980) modified my story to include six errors instead of five and changed the protagonist from a man to a woman so that he could use an inconsistent pronoun. In his experimental design he used two popula-tions: seventh graders and university undergraduates. Also, he used two conditions: half of each population was given instructions much like mine. The other half was told to look for errors in the story. All subjects were then asked to write the story as they remembered reading it and to list as many errors as they remembered. After each group responded under a timed condition, they were given unlimited time to search for the errors.

Jingguo Xu (1998) replicated this study several years later with native Chinese readers in Shanghai using a Chinese text which was somewhat




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longer and had eight embedded errors (Xu, 1998). Xu used the same basic design as Gollasch. These error detection studies provided strong support for the concept that readers in both languages, though one is alphabetic and the other ideographic (characters represent ideas), are focused on mak-ing sense of the text and do not identify every word or character in order to get to meaning.

There were striking similarities in the findings of the two studies:• None of the participants in either study was able to detect even

half of the errors under limited time exposure.

• Readers focused on constructing meaning, even when they were instructed to detect errors. No participant detected every error even with unlimited time to search.

• Errors on content words were detected more than function words. This was true for all groups in both studies.

• Meaning-focused groups scored higher in story recall than error-focused groups.

• Meaning-focused groups had lower rates of error detection than the error-focused groups.

• The university students scored higher in story recall than the junior high students.

• The university students also had higher rates of error detection.

These strong similarities in the findings of the studies show that mean-ing and not accuracy is the focus of both English and Chinese reading. Xu’s Chinese subjects detected a smaller proportion of errors than did Gollasch’s English readers. Xu (1998) suggests:

The difference might be due to the configurational compactness as well as the direct association of form and meaning in Chinese characters. Certainly there is no evidence that Chinese reading is less efficient than English reading. In fact, it appears that Chinese writing may be making access to meaning somewhat more effi-cient in Chinese. (p. 266)

Several studies over recent years draw on my basic model of the reading process. They have provided greater detail to the model and made it more broadly applicable to other languages.




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Aphasic Literacy Over 18 months I conducted a collaborative case study of a pecan farmer who had a stroke at the age of 34. The stroke caused partial paralysis on his right side and impaired his language, both oral and written. This was a col-laborative study; the subject participated through a dialogue in the explora-tion of his reading and writing. I asked him to read and write in a variety of tasks varying from isolated letters, numerals, and words to increasingly authentic, contextual language. We also explored his performance over time on tasks of the same sort.

From the beginning it was clear that though his linguistic performance was impaired, his linguistic competence was not. He understood both oral and written language and made clear to me that he always knew what he wanted to say or write even though he had some difficulty doing so. His speaking was effective but labored — he would sometimes have to search for words or phrases. His writing was effective but slow. Because of his right-hand paralysis he had switched to writing with his left hand, printing legibly in all caps. His spelling was usually correct. If he made a mistake he seemed to know it.

He could not repeat or write a string of single-digit numbers, but he could recall and write longer numbers if they were dictated as a date (e.g., 1995), a sum of money ($10,392), or a larger number (five thousand six hundred and ninety-five). He could do computations of multidigit numbers with no trouble.

He could not remember and produce a string of letters unless he recognized them as a word, but he could write and correctly spell most dictated words. On one occasion, he brought me a message he had written to the man who had his night job during the day. He told me it took him 45 minutes to write a four-line message and at one point he changed the wording to avoid a particular word he had trouble writing. In his sessions with me he often would write or begin to write a word he was having trouble saying. In his early sessions, function words were more problematic than content words, and he used devices like writing “4” when he had trouble writing “for.”

Andrea Garcia, who has a master’s degree in speech therapy, used the data I had collected in my study in her dissertation to examine the subject’s oral reading using a modified miscue analysis. In one part of her study




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the subject read a Mem Fox book. Then he was asked him to listen to his 6-year-old son as he read the same book. Though his own reading was labored, he was able to monitor his son’s reading, offering help when the boy made a miscue or hesitated in his reading. This study is also in the Scientific Realism book.

Our studies of this aphasic man’s literacy showed him always more effective with meaningful and functional wholes than with isolated lan-guage elements.

Fluency in Reading The word “fluency” is a term often used in reading research to refer to rapid, accurate word recognition. Alan Flurkey devised a computer-based methodology of challenging this view of fluency using miscue analysis with a technique that made it possible for him to look at speed of oral reading over any unit of text from a letter to a paragraph or page. What he found is that reading does not flow evenly over the text, as the term “fluency” sug-gests, but rather ebbs and flows much as a river does. Speed responded to the same text features as the reader’s oral miscues did.

Flurkey found that not only did reading speed vary considerably as a reader reads a given text, but that more proficient readers show more variation in their reading speed in the course of reading a text than less proficient read-ers. That supports a view of reading as a transaction with a text in which meaning is continuously constructed. Flurkey suggests we should be using the term “flow” rather than “fluency.” This study is also reported in the Scientific Realism book.

Eye Movement and Miscue Analysis (EMMA) More than a century of research on eye movements is frequently cited to support the view of reading as word recognition. Adams (1990) and others have claimed that this research shows that readers identify every word as they read and that accurate word recognition is critical in read-ing. Eric Paulson reviewed both early and contemporary research on eye movements and found that in fact the research shows that readers fixate around 70% of words, with more fixations on content words than function words. Paulson found that eye movement research supported a meaning




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construction model of reading and did not support a word recognition view as advocates of that view had been claiming (Paulson and Goodman in the Scientific Realism book).

That led Paulson to begin a body of research which combined eye move-ment research with miscue analysis (EMMA). This research uses eye tracking equipment to record eye movements as readers read orally from a text displayed on a computer screen. Together, the miscue analysis and eye tracking provide a continuous record of the reading that indicates where the reader was fixating in the text and the duration of the fixation at each point of the oral reading. In this analysis the researcher is able to tell whether miscued words are fixated and whether fixated words are read accurately or miscued.

EMMA research requires that readers read a complete text of several pages in length. That provides far more data than other eye movement research, which usually involves single lines of print or short sequences. It also provides much more insight into the relationships between regressive eye movements and self-corrections in oral reading. Paulson finds that while pauses in oral reading are often are accompanied by regressive eye move-ments, indicating the reader’s search for meaning, not all regressions are accompanied by miscues.

Paulson’s development of EMMA methodology has led to a series of doc-toral research studies. Peter Duckett used this methodology to study first graders reading a picture book. A somewhat surprising finding in his study is that most of these young readers’ fixations were on the text and not on the pictures. The readers tend to move their eyes to the pictures when they encounter problems in the text; thus, they use the pictures to resolve the meaning of the text.

Duckett’s research brings into question the long-standing practice of pro-ducing books and instructional material for beginners in very large print (Paulson & Freeman, 2003). A fairly small area around the point of fixation is in foveal view — that is, sharp focus. A larger area is in the parafoveal view — visible but fuzzy. A still-larger area is only peripherally visible. If the print is large, often less than a full word is in clear view. That may be good in that it forces the reader to infer what is not in foveal view. That would fit with a meaning-construction model. On the other hand, it could force




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the reader to make multiple fixations for the same amount of information available in smaller font sizes.

Anne Freeman used EMMA research in her dissertation on bilingual read-ers reading alternate chapters of the same text in Spanish and English. She found the readers using essentially the same strategies in reading both languages, and their eye movement patterns were very similar in both languages. Though Spanish was their dominant language, they tended to be somewhat stronger readers of English, which probably reflected their school experience (i.e., they were asked to read more in English than Spanish) (Paulson & Freeman, 2003).

Current studies involve the use of EMMA research with readers of French, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. A less formal study of readers of Russian, using Cyrillic print, has also been completed. All these studies support the view of reading as a universal process of meaning construction, regardless of language or orthography.

Text and ContextEarly in my career, I believed I had convincingly shown that words occur in both syntactic and semantic contexts and that, therefore, reading focuses not on accurate word identification but on constructing meaning. Only in the context of this meaning construction can words be identified. Many teachers accepted this view, although a persistent and influential group of researchers strongly rejects the importance of context (Adams, 1990).

The reading of Hebrew or Arabic can only be understood as requiring the use of context to not only identify words but also to assign gram-matical structure to ambiguous print representation. Both Semitic lan-guages use alphabets that represent only consonants with only minimal representation of vowels. In a sense, each consonant can represent any consonant-vowel phonetic sequence. In both cases, a set of diacritics can be used to more fully represent the oral language, but this is used only in early instruction or in rare circumstances, such as the writing of the Koran in Arabic. Furthermore, much of the syntax of Arabic is in vowel affixes, which are usually not present in print.

Jasem Mohammed Al-Fahid (2000) devised two experiments to see how literate native speakers of Arabic make sense of Arabic print. In the first,




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he asked Arab University of Arizona students with non-language majors to read two versions of a story, one with vowel markings and one without. In all cases but one his subjects read the unmarked version significantly more quickly. His subjects indicated that they felt they had to be more careful in reading the marked copy. That may be because they are not comfortable having more print detail. It may also be because they only see holy materi-als in the marked form, and their religious beliefs are that such material must be read more carefully. Indeed, the one subject who read both ver-sions about equally fast indicated he was very religious.

In the second study his subjects were shown a single sentence in the un-marked form. They were asked to read it as many ways as they could and write each using marked writing. Each sentence could have as many as nine different readings that varied in tense, subject, gender, and voice. Yet his subjects usually could identify only one or two of the most likely read-ings of the out-of-context sentence.

Adams (1990) has argued that when words are ambiguous the reader ac-cesses all possibilities and then uses context to select the appropriate one. Al-Fahid’s study makes it clear that this cannot be happening. His subjects were all aware that to read Arabic one depends heavily on context. His readers were focused on constructing meaning and in so doing they were assigning syntax and word forms appropriate to the contextual meaning. They were largely unaware of any ambiguity in the print.

It is easy to see that Arabic writing is not a perfect one-to-one representation of spoken Arabic. But systems that use letters for vowels aren’t one-to-one, either. All writing systems are semiotic, two-dimensional, and presented in an arbitrary direction (right to left, top to bottom, etc.) on a flat surface. Oral language, however, consists of sound sequences presented over time. The Roman alphabet represents the oral language more completely than the Arabic but it often uses more than one letter for a sound and it does not completely represent language features such as intonation. English words like record (v.) and record (n.) are spelled the same, although the verb form stresses the second syllable and the noun stresses the first. Writing is an alternate way of expressing meaning to speaking, but the two forms of lan-guage do so somewhat differently. Making sense of each always requires dealing with ambiguity that must be resolved from context.




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Because of the persistence of the word-identification view of reading, Peter Fries and I have decided to bring together a complete discussion of the im-portance of context in reading. Fries is a systemic-functional linguist who has worked with Halliday and other semioticians and who is very familiar with my work and that of my colleagues and students.

We bring together the perspective of reading as the construction of mean-ing and that of corpus linguistics, which examines the nature of real texts and the relationships of their components. In other words, we will be ex-amining the transactions between readers and texts. Within the transac-tional study we’ll look at what Halliday calls the lexico-grammar, where wording and syntax are interrelated.

The NonconclusionSince this a review of my life’s work — and I am still working — there is no conclusion yet. But I am confident of certain things for the future. Much of what is being imposed by law on research and practice in the early part of the 21st century will be seen in the future (I hope the near future) as the pedagogy of the absurd. Sanity will prevail and those interested in literacy will wonder how people could have argued against the realities of literacy processes.

I’m equally sure that some of the current insights will be proven to be in-sufficient to explain new layers of reality discovered by those clever enough to find ways of getting at them.

I have full confidence that professionalism among teachers will continue to spread around the world despite the efforts of those who would deskill teaching and blow up the colleges of education. I have confidence that researchers and teachers will listen to and learn from each other, which will improve both research and practice. Both will become more authentic and holistic and what we presently call “whole language” will expand its acceptance, though perhaps under new names.

I think it is possible that ideas and practices currently marginalized in the United States will come back to us in fresh new forms from developing countries as they seek to build liberatory school practices. By that time our




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politicians will tire of imposing mandates that hurt more than they help, and teachers will get some respect as dedicated professionals.

Deep in my heart, I do believe. We shall overcome some day.

ReferencesAdams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print: A summary.

Champaign, IL: Center for the Study of Reading.

Al- Fahid, J. M. (2000). Goodman psycholinguistic model of English reading and its ap-plicability to Semitic languages. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Brown, J., Goodman, K. S., & Marek, A. M. (1996). Studies in miscue analysis: An anno-tated bibliography. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon.

Dombey, H. (2004). Revolutionary reading [essay review]. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(6), 1-13.

Ferreiro, E., & Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Fries, C. C. (1963). Linguistics and reading. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.

Gollasch, F. (1980). Readers’ perceptions in detecting and processing embedded errors in meaningful text. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Goodman, K. S. (1965a). Cues and miscues in reading: A linguistic study. Elementary English, 42, 639-643.

Goodman, K. S. (1965b). Dialect barriers to reading comprehension. Elementary English, 42, 852-860.

Goodman, K. S. (1967). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist, 6, 126-135.

Goodman, K. S. (1970). Dialect rejection and reading: A response. Reading Research Quarterly, 5, 600-603.

Goodman, K. S. (1986). What’s whole in whole language? Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goodman, K. S. (1993). Phonics phacts. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goodman, K. S. (1996). On reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goodman, K. S. (1998). In defense of good teaching: What teachers need to know about the “reading wars.” York, ME: Stenhouse.

Goodman, K. S., & Buck, C. (1973). Dialect barriers to reading comprehension revisited. Reading Teacher, 27, 6-12.




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Goodman, K. S., Flurkey, A. D., & Paulson, E. J. (in press). Scientific realism in studies of reading. Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum.

Goodman, K. S., Flurkey, A. D., & Xu, J. (2003). On the revolution of reading: The selected writings of Kenneth S. Goodman. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goodman, K., Shannon, P., Goodman, Y., & Rapoport, R. (2004). Saving our schools. Oakland, CA: RDR Books.

Goodman, K. S., & Smith, E. B. (1987). Language and thinking in school: A whole-lan-guage curriculum (3rd ed.). New York: R. C. Owen.

Goodman, K. S., & Smith, F. (1971). On the psycholinguistic method of teaching reading. Elementary School Journal, 71, 177-181.

Goodman, Y. M. (1971). Longitudinal study of children’s oral reading behavior. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Edu-cation, Bureau of Research.

Goodman, Y. M., & Goodman, K. S. (1992). Vygotsky in a whole-language perspective. In C. M. Luis (Ed.), Vygotsky and education: Instructional implications and applications of sociohistorical psychology (pp. 223-250). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Goodman, Y. M., Watson, D. J., & Burke, C. L. (1987). Reading miscue inventory: Alterna-tive procedures. New York: R. C. Owen.

Halliday, M. (1975). Learning how to mean. New York: Elsevier.

Labov, W. (1980). Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic Press.

Paulson, E. J., & Freeman, A. E. (2003). Insight from the eyes: The science of effective reading instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Piaget, J. (1970). Structuralism. New York: Harper & Row.

Shuy, R. W. (1967). Discovering American dialects. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Smith, F., Miller, G. A., & United States Human Communication Program. (1966). The genesis of language; a psycholinguistic approach. Proceedings of a conference on “language development in children.” Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Sobel, D. (1999). Galileo’s daughter: A historical memoir of science, faith, and love. New York: Walker & Company.

Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological pro-cesses. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Woodley, J. W. (1984). Perception in a psycholinguistic model of the reading process: A research report. Tucson: Arizona Center for Research and Development, College of Education, University of Arizona.

Xu, J. (1998). A study of the reading process in Chinese through detecting errors in a meaningful text. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson.



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