The Study of Oral Reading Errors: A Survey of the Literature

REVIEWS HOW oral reading errors have been analyzed in more than thirty studies to establish norms for the diagnosis of reading difficulties and to provide insight into the nature of the reading process. The assumption that oral reading reflects the silent reading process is discussed and various systems for describing errors, studies indicating the strategies that readers use to exploit graphic and contextual information, related variables such as maturity, differential training, difficulty of materials, and response style are considered. Notable in much of the research in this area is the failure of investigators to take into account the various levels of linguistic structure or to indicate how closely an erroneous response approximates an expected response on any of those levels.