Graphophonic and Orthography Analysis of the Text - Case Study Example

Graphophonic Analysis of the text The first few words met in the text are “I come from TimoR” which if analyzed, show a number of incorrect guesses (miscues) made. In nearly every case, the reader majorly changed verb for verb and noun for noun. Taking a case of TimoR, the substituted word looked very similar to the actual word and did not dramatically change the sense or the meaning of the passage. This is a case where the reader was attempting to read by using cues such as look of the words (grapho/phonic), meaning of the words (sematic) and the sound of the words –grammar (syntactic). In other cases however, the substitution was not acceptable. For instance, he substituted shool with school which when read within the context of his/her statement alters the intended meaning of the sentence and the passage. However, the reader was attempting to make such substitutions in cases where the words substituted resembled the original word (come and came or shool and school). This suggests that the reader should pay more attention when it comes to a-controlled vowels and would have been proper if s/he is encouraged to pay more attention to the meaning. Still on the substitution of shool for school, It is worth noting that using small passage could be away of encouraging the reader to predict some words thus boosting his/her other parts of the reading cueing systems otherwise the reader is not using syntactic and semantic cues. In totality, the teacher should be contented with this kind of error since the intended meaning has been more or less kept. Goodman (2014) argues that in most cases, substitution of words such as teach for taught or come for came may not cause a change in the intended meaning. However, substitutions such as James for Jimmy may not be have accepted had it been used. There is a case where the reader has used the expression “I no.” First, this level of substitution shows that the reader is an absolute beginner or could be a case of Milestones 6 and 7 or just Entry 1. While this substitution is not accepted, it also makes the sentence lose meaning. The reader is clearly not having good grasp of phonics and simply had to rely on sematic cues. Wohlwend (2012) found that beginners or unskilled readers are often poor at using context to help them in reading. It is for this reason that “I no.” has been put by the reader. The reader intended to say ‘I now go to school” though s/he put this as “I no went school.” Basically, this is a case where miscue is fitting more than just a given system. I no and I now are effective graphophonic miscue which again has syntactic and semantic acceptability. The point to consider here is that this level of miscue may not affect the entire meaning of the text since the reader did not make many mistakes of the sort. This is different with “stay” instead of stayed. The reader has actually put the word ‘stay’ in a number of instances when s/he was supposed to put the word ‘stayed.’ However, these words are generally acceptable. That is, they are actually close to the graphophonic systems and for that matter they are semantically acceptable. There could be a challenge with the reader and perhaps s/he may have been impulsive and ought to have been told to slow down in reading. Another aspect that has to be pointed out is the expression “how age you.” In this case the reader intended to say ‘how old are you.’ This level of miscue indicates that the reader is not making any attempts to apply graphophonic knowledge. S/he appears to be one with little reading strategies thus what s/he is having is unable to help him/her especially when words are not recognized on sight. In conclusion it can be noted that the reader is not determined in his/her reading. In some cases, there is clear evidence of incorrect punctuation and this means that the reader does not understand the gist of the text. This further suggests that the reader is not keen on strategies as his/her main word recognition tool. As a matter of fact, this gives evidence of cases where there are many words that have been substituted wrongly and are not even close in terms of length, does not share visual length and does not begin with the same letter, like shool. Secondly, the reader has no secure phoneme-grapheme correspondence and as a result is struggling to use decoding aspects effectively when s/he meets new words and that is the case with words such as collingwood, TimoR and Po Mi. Again the endeavor to take in the whole sentence or word without a consideration on close analysis of all its parts has made the reader ignore or leave suffixes and suffices that are essential. Orthography Analysis of the text The text as presented brings a clear indication of developmental lag on dyslexic reader to a gap existing between their anticipated phonological level of processing and his/her general level of intelligence. Secondly, the text also shows a reader with inability to read unfamiliar words, pseudo words or irregular words. This is an indication that the reader is having challenges with phonological processing thus hindering his/her chances to decode phonologically. The following are some of the challenges from the text. First, there are some errors that can be attributed to visual similarities. For instance there is a case of ‘shool’ and ‘school.’ Based on this error, there was a possibility that the reader adopted lexical reading tactics or strategies when reading but to some extent the reader did not grasp strategies related to phonological decoding of a given text. Also related to this error is the evidence of his/her failure when it came to pronunciation. This failure has impacted his/her ability to read some words and to that extent there is a possibility that it stemmed from his/her inability to decompose some letters of a given word before making application of grapheme-phonene rules. Research by Ravid and Berman (2010) indicate that these levels of error may occur when readers are not having sufficient knowledge regarding letters-sound rules thus inability to blend phonemes. Another challenge noticed in the text is the aspect of regulation effect. In this case, it is clear that the reader was reading irregular words as analogous when compared with regular ones and in such cases these words sounded as the irregular or the other way round. For instance, the text presents words such as I no which rhymes with words such as I now. Such confusion is an indication that the reader was using phonological decoding tactics and for that matter did not use a given lexical strategy. It can also be a case of refusal or what Masmoudi et al. (2015) term as non-reaction. According to the author, non-reaction is a case where readers at early age tend to fail or ignore dealing with new terms or unfamiliar terms or words and as a result they resort to guessing them as a strategy of overcoming the challenge. This can be exhibited by words such as TimoR or hunderd. A critical point to consider is that the reader is conversant with Arabic language or Arabic is his/her first language and this can be attested to the fact that he came from Timor. It is because of this that there are some errors that came as a result of a given Arabic orthography. The text as provided shows the irregular pronunciation rules as well as visual letter confusion---a challenge that comes as a result of a given Arabic orthography. Words such as shool and stud come as a result of reader lacking the grapheme–phoneme correspondence (GPC) rules. The consequence of this is that the reader fails to acquire the needed lexical skills and knowledge of English words thus resulting in series of errors that look like the profile of the developing reader. This conclusion is in tandem with earlier finding by Syed et al. (2010) who showed that where there is serious phonological deficit when applying grapheme-phoneme rules in decoding of a given word then one will realize that dyslexics will rely on visual tactic or strategies when it comes to word recognition. Consistently, in case of dyslexics reading pseudo words that requires the reader to have high phonological decoding concepts, the non-semantic dysphonetic, semi-phonetic and the nonsemantic errors will likely to be higher and that is the reason as to why the reader made these mistakes; I no went Shool hunderd On the other hand, it can be possible that the mistakes/errors were committed due to the fact that the reader being an Arab found non-semantic not related to any Arabic morphology. Furthermore, it is clear from the text that there were high visual similarities between some sounds, letters or words. However, a given mastery on GPC rules is related to success in accurate reading which apparently is lacking in this case. The reason for this could be due to the fact that the reader is at initial stages of his/her reading and acquisition of orthographic tactics. References Goodman, K. S. (2014). Miscue analysis as scientific realism. Making Sense of Learners Making Sense of Written Language: The Selected Works of Kenneth S. Goodman and Yetta M. Goodman: The Selected Works of Kenneth S. Goodman and Yetta M. Goodman, 31. Masmoudi, A., Habash, N., Ellouze, M., Estève, Y., & Belguith, L. H. (2015). Arabic Transliteration of Romanized Tunisian Dialect Text: A Preliminary Investigation. In Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (pp. 608-619). Springer International Publishing. Ravid, D., & Berman, R. A. (2010). Developing noun phrase complexity at school age: A text embedded cross-linguistic analysis. First Language, 30(1), 3-26. Syed, A. Z., Aslam, M., & Martinez-Enriquez, A. M. (2010). Lexicon based sentiment analysis of Urdu text using SentiUnits. In Advances in Artificial Intelligence (pp. 32-43). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Wohlwend, K. E. (2012). A new spin on miscue analysis: Using spider charts to web reading processes. Language Arts, 90(2), 110-118. Read More