The effects of varying text length on the oral reading miscues of good and poor readers in grade two

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of text genre and text length on the oral reading miscues of able and less-able early readers. The two genres of text compared were expository vs. narrative; and the three text lengths compared were short (100-150 words) vs. medium (400-500 words) vs. long (600-700 words). Subjects were 48 second graders: 24 good readers and 24 poor readers. The reading level for good readers ranged from 3.5-4.0 and for poor readers from 1.8-2.2. There were 25 girls and 23 boys in all: 11 boys and 13 girls in the group of good readers and 12 boys and 12 girls in the group of poor readers. The study was conducted over four weeks. Pretesting and selection of the students was done in the first week. In the following two weeks, miscue and comprehension data for both good and poor readers was collected. The researcher worked one-on-one with each student. Since passage length was a repeated measure, each student orally read a short, a medium, and a long story randomly selected from the pool of four passages at each length, genre, and ability combination. The order of reading the texts was counterbalanced. Also, at each ability level, half of the students read narrative texts and half read expository texts. The oral readings were tape recorded to be coded for miscues later. After reading each text, students were asked to retell the text. The researcher returned the fourth week to work with students absent in the previous two weeks. A 3-Way MANOVA with repeated measures on the third factor (text length) was conducted.;The results indicated that except for comprehension for good readers (they maintained the same level of comprehension across short, medium, and long texts), good and poor readers read the short text with fewer errors than they read the medium and long texts; read the short passage at a more rapid rate than they read the medium and long texts; and the poor readers had a higher level of comprehension of the short text than they did for medium and long texts. However, inspection of miscue types indicates that increased context is helpful to poor readers. Poor readers types of miscues were qualitatively better when presented with longer texts. In regards to text genre, there were no significant differences between narrative and expository text in rate of reading, percent of oral reading miscues, and comprehension indicating that students can handle both types of text with equal ease.