Reading miscue analysis of the students of SMP IMKA/ YMKA I Surabaya - a case study

Goodman posits reading as a Psycholinguistic guessing game. He believes reading is a language process in which language interact with thought. In analyzing oral reading he founds the reader make reading miscue, oral response (OR) which does not match with expected response (ER), that reflect the reading process itself. Thus the result compare the reading comprehension reflected from retelling and answering reading questions. Reading miscue analysis is held in order to know the reading miscue used by the readers of SLTP in Surabaya and to analyze the readers' use of the semantic, syntactic and graphophonic (three language cueing systems) in English. Having analyzed 6 subjects from the different levels of English (good, average and poor learners), the writers found 710 miscues under 4 categories, those are substitution 669 (94.2%), omission 29 (4.3%), reversal 11 (1.6%) and insertion 1 (0.2%). Most of the miscues made are influenced by their first language ability. Those miscues then were described into graphic similarity, sound similarity, grammatical fiction, correction, grammatical acceptability, semantic acceptability, meaning change, meaning construction and grammatical relationship. From the findings, the writer finds that in reading English, readers transfer their reading ability from their native language, thus, their English ability does not influence too much. The subjects who are poor learners tend to pay attention too much in pronouncing words which make them difficult to understand the passage read. One of the average learners also does the same thing as the poor learner do while another could read very well. Both of the subjects who are good learners are also the good English readers. Finally the writer gives some suggestions on how to optimize the reading ability