Nonlinear processing as a comprehension strategy: A proposed typology for the study of bilingual children’s self-corrections of oral reading miscues

This paper reports on a study of bilingual elementary students’ oral reading miscue patterns focused on self-correction strategies. Specifically, two kinds of self-monitoring during reading were compared: self-correction for which previous context to the miscue provided no prompt to self-correct, and self-correction for which the miscue itself and/or the previous context appeared to be sufficient to signal the self-correction. While both of these measures can be associated with productive reading strategies, it is the former that seems to be related more closely to written language processing of the more conscious and reflective kind. The primary objective of the study was to discuss a proposed typology of reading self-corrections that would be useful in studying how beginning readers process text. The 45 students, who either spoke or understood both Spanish and Náhuatl, and were from a semi-rural community in central Mexico, were also tested on a series of language awareness measures as well as general assessments of reading and writing, to explore relationships among these measures. In school, virtually all literacy instruction is in Spanish, reflecting a sharply diglossic allocation of the two languages in the speech community as a whole. Children’s awareness of this aspect of language use was also assessed.