Early Oral Reading Research Articles

Meaning Construction in Early Oral Reading

The authors’ interest in the associations between beginners’ reading and writing performance led them to devise an index of children's meaning construction in reading by increasing the specificity of the Reading Miscue Inventory meaning change index to include finer discriminations between superficial and meaning disruptive miscues potentially reflective of beginners’ writing errors. Additionally, the authors inserted textual disruptions in a story to examine the children's meaning making under formative textual challenges frequently encountered in emergent literacy engagements. Fifty-one 2nd-grade students participating in a longitudinal early literacy project read a story, the last quarter of which contained meaning disruptions. Participants’ adaptations of these latter disruptions were compared with their meaning change miscue scores based on their nondisrupted reading performance. Adaptation scores were related to meaning change scores, suggesting that skill in adaptation to disruptions also reflects meaning construction processes, opening a door for manipulating textual discrepancies in order to document formatively, and thus find avenues for ameliorating, specific reading/writing difficulties.

Early Reading Skills and Academic Achievement Trajectories of Students Facing Poverty, Homelessness, and High Residential Mobility

This investigation tested the importance of early academic achievement for later achievement trajectories among 18,011 students grouped by level of socioeconomic risk. Students considered to be at highest risk were those who experienced homelessness or high residential mobility (HHM). HHM students were compared with students eligible for free meals, students eligible for reduced price meals, and students who were neither HHM nor low income. Socioeconomic risk and oral reading ability in first grade predicted growth of reading and math achievement in Grades 3 through 8. Risk status predicted achievement beyond the effects of early reading scores and also moderated the prediction of later growth in reading achievement from early oral reading. Results underscore the early emergence and persistence of achievement gaps related to poverty, the high and accumulating risk for HHM students, and the significance of oral reading in first grade as both an early indicator of risk and a potential protective factor.