Professional Books: Reading Miscue Inventory – From Evaluation to Instruction 2/E

Most of us have had those moments of illumination, which perception psychologists call the “ah-ha experience.” Sometimes the illumination is slow, like the gradual understanding of the punch line of a joke you don’t initially “get.” Other times it can be a sudden, “eureka-like” illumination that occurs in a flash, when, like Archimedes in the bath, the solution to a complex problem we’ve been struggling to resolve suddenly emerges.

While “ah-ha” experiences are merely one of the many forms of learning we can engage in, they’re often more memorable and long-lasting than other mundane learning experiences we have in the course of our daily lives. Some of these experiences change our lives to such a degree that we can never go back to thinking, knowing, understanding, or behaving in the ways we did prior to this particular “ah-ha.”

I had one of these life-changing “ah-ha’s” in 1975 and remember it clearly. I was engaged in postdoctoral work at Harvard, where some of the luminaries of the reading world, including Jeanne Chall, Courtney Cazden, Carole Chomsky, Helen Popp, and others, mentored, guided, and continually chal­lenged me. I also had auditing privileges with MIT, which was two stations away on the MTA. I spent many hours auditing courses in MIT’s linguistics department and attending seminars conducted by its psycholinguistic and artificial intelligence research groups. I considered myself to be at the centre of the learning, language, and reading universe. I thought I was in academic heaven.

During one of the many coffee breaks I took at Harvard, the late Jeanne Chall said to me, “Brian, there’s this fellow Ken Goodman who’s writing a lot about something called miscue analysis. He claims it shows that meaning-based approaches support learning to read better than code-based approaches. Seeing you have more time than the rest of us, why don’t you research his claims? Perhaps you could do a paper for the Harvard Ed. Review, which we could publish?”

xShe gave me a rather large red box, which had the words “Reading Miscue Inventory” written on its shiny new exterior. I also noted the authors’ names and recall commenting to Jeanne thus: “I thought you said it was ‘Ken Goodman’ who was responsible for miscue analysis. Only one of these authors is a Goodman, someone named ‘Yetta.’ 

Jeanne informed me that the authors had worked with Ken on his miscue research and that Yetta was Ken’s wife. She then explained how they’d taken the original miscue taxonomy Ken had used in his research and made it more teacher friendly. She finally commented, “A version which has been modified for classroom use might be a good way to ‘get into his work.” I took this red box back to my office and opened it. It contained several red book­lets, some scoring templates, and some audiotapes. I quickly skimmed the titles of books. The one called Manual for Using RMI caught my eye. I opened it and began reading.

Much later, after studying Ken’s original research, deconstructing the origi­nal full version of the miscue Taxonomy, and after publishing an essay on his work in the Reading Research Quarterly (Cambourne 1975-1976) I recognized the brilliance of their work. They’d taken a very complex, multitheoretical taxonomy and turned it into a classroom teacher-friendly tool with­out “dumbing it down.” They’d created a multifaceted educational tool that not only helped teachers understand the reading process, but which helped them identify all students’ reading strengths and weaknesses and then offered them viable classroom-based strategies that were based on these strengths and weaknesses. In one sense it was a full reading curriculum in a box. It had a solid theoretical base; it could be used as a diagnostic tool; it could be used to quantitatively evaluate, compare, and rank readers in terms of strengths and weaknesses; it could be used to design and justify theoretically valid teaching strategies for each individual member of a class.

From that point my life changed forever. I began a wild, exhilarating, unpredictable, sometimes frightening, intellectual ride, not unlike those I had experienced as a youthful member of the surfboard fraternity in an earlier life. Intellectually it was like pushing oneself over the edge of a huge, slowly breaking wave, feeling it pick you up, thrust you forward with its power, never knowing whether you should stand and cut left, right, or even pull back from the wave before it broke, fearful that if you continued to “go with it” it might suddenly break and “dump” you painfully in the shallows. As I reflect on that period of my professional growth with the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, it is now obvious that in 1975 I’d been caught up in a Kuhn-ian scientific revolution. According to Strauss (2005), “Scientific revolutions occur when a crisis within the scientific paradigm is resolved by the adoption, within the scientific community, of new, empirically supported principles that redefine what counts as a theoretically significant problem, and the way that problem is solved” (Strauss 2005, 166). Of course, in 1975 I wasn’t aware that I was caught up in a Kuhn-ian scientific revolution. I thought I was simply experiencing multiple “ah-ha’s” about reading, language, learning, and teaching. One in particular stands out. I clearly remember reading a statement, somewhere in the RMI materials that Jeanne Chall had loaned me, a statement something like this: “The oral and written forms of language are parallel versions of the same thing—language.”

The implications of this statement struck me with tsunami-like force. Michael Halliday’s (1975) Learning How to Mean had just been published. When I put Halliday’s work and this one particular concept from the RMI together in my head, thoughts started bubbling up and spilling over each other at a frenetic pace; I can still remember the trains of thought that rattled through my head: “If learning to talk is learning how to mean using the oral mode of language, then perhaps learning how to read and write is learning how to mean using the written form of language. If they’re parallel versions of the same thing, then perhaps they can be learned similarly? Perhaps learning how to mean is natural? Perhaps complex meaning making is what the human brain has evolved to do? Perhaps the processes inherent in the complex learning that makes learning to talk possible have some implications for learning to read?”

Those of you who know my work will realize that this one ah-ha pushed me in the direction that I’ve been traveling for the last thirty years. This long-awaited revised edition of the RMI—a now classic work—will certainly provide fresh insights for both the current and a new generation of educators and scholars. Those familiar with the RMI will revisit Betsy in a new case study, explore on a deeper level the value and use of the Burke Reading Interview, find extensively updated references and new research, and discover several new chapters on differentiated reading instruction. And those new to the RMI will understand readers and reading on an entirely different plane.

I urge you—teachers of children, teachers of adult readers and writers, professors, and graduate students—to use the RMI with real learners reading real texts. I can guarantee that if you do, you too will experience some eureka-like “ah-ha’s” that will push you in new professional directions. Brian Cambourne

References
Cambourne, Brian. 1976-1977. “Getting to Goodman: An Analysis of the Goodman Model of Reading with Some Suggestions for Evaluation.” Reading Research Quarterly. Volume 12, number 4, pp. 605-636.

Halliday, Michael A.K. 1975. Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language (Explorations in Language Study Series). London: Edward Arnold.

Strauss, Steven L. 2005. The Linguistics, Neurology, and Politics of Phonics: Silent “E” Speaks Out. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.