Oral reading miscues by intermediate Chinese as second language readers

Reading is a universal skill, but it is also adapted to different written languages. Chinese writing lacks sound-to-spelling correspondence, visible word boundaries, and overt inflection. These linguistic features of Chinese present great challenges for second language (L2) learners when reading in Chinese. It is hard for researchers and language educators to observe the reading process directly from silent reading; however, reading aloud provides us with a transparent window for observing this process. Oral reading miscue analysis can serve as a powerful tool for educators to understand Chinese L2 readers’ cognitive and linguistic difficulties in reading comprehension, so as to provide effective interventions and support. Three research questions are addressed in this study: (1) What types, linguistic categories, and distributions of oral reading miscues do intermediate learners of Chinese make? (2) What is the relationship between the different categories of oral reading miscues and passage comprehension? (3) What perspectives do Chinese L2 readers have toward their oral reading miscues? This study encompassed various types of data, including proficiency test scores, oral passage reading recordings, translations of texts, language background survey data, and one-on-one RMA interviews, to capture a holistic picture of oral reading and its connection with literal-level reading comprehension. The participants in this study were 66 intermediate-level Chinese L2 readers from eight U.S. universities. Thirty of them completed an individual retrospective miscue analysis interview with the researcher. The results revealed that intermediate Chinese L2 readers made 14 types of oral reading miscues. These miscue types can be further grouped into four categories based on linguistic features: orthographic knowledge-based (ORM), syntactic knowledge-based (SYM), semantic knowledge-based (SEM), and word knowledge-related miscues (WOM). A statistically significant negative correlation was observed between the number of miscues and literary-level passage comprehension. However, not all types of miscues negatively correlated with passage comprehension; in particular, four miscue types—mispronouncing tones, repetitions, long pauses between words, and inappropriate pauses within a word—showed no statistically significant correlation with comprehension. Three miscue categories—ORM, SYM, and SEM—had statistically significant negative correlations with passage comprehension, but this was not found for the WOM category. The interview data showed that linguistic difficulties in Chinese were the major cause of oral reading miscues. The participants’ linguistic difficulties lie in various domains: orthographic and phonological processing, morphological processing, word recognition and segmentation, and syntactic processing at the sentence/context level. Miscues may also result from other challenges in Chinese L2 oral reading, such as oral reading task-specific features and affective factors. The interview data also revealed that some oral reading behaviors, including self-corrections, pauses, and repetitions, can facilitate reading comprehension. The results contribute to the current understanding of the role of oral reading miscues in the cognitive processing of Chinese text and provide insights into the use of miscue analysis as an instructional intervention to optimize reading comprehension.