Reading as an Interactive Process / Larry Miller and Others.

A study examined the linguistic strategies of strong and weak readers in grades three and six within the context of D. E. Rumelhart's interactive model of the reading process. A linguistic prediction task was set up to investigate students' use of orthographic constraints, syntactic redundancy, and syntactic and semantic knowledge. A program was written for a computer so the prediction task could be presented as a progressive cloze activity. The data were examined using inferential and descriptive statistics and detailed protocols of individual performances. Contrary to prediction, inferential analyses of the data revealed no significant differences between the groups of readers. Descriptive statistics showed some of the problems underlying the application of inferential analyses. Protocol examination, comparing the performance of ideal readers with real ones, was the most revealing form of analysis as it showed the individual differences of children in using interactive processes to carry out language tasks. (Author/FL)

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