Historically, the term 'miscue' was first employed by Goodman (1962) where he develops a system for comparing expected oral reading responses with observed oral reading responses. His system is concerned with meaning and how it changes when miscues occur both at the word and sentence levels. To show the importance of miscues, he argues that the written language becomes parallel to the oral language in a literate society. To him, reading (the process through which miscues occur) is a psycholinguistic process involving the use of language in its written form to get to meaning, which may be twisted by misreading a word or a sentenc.e . Subsequent work has focused on the interaction between different cue systems in the reading process (i.e. phonetic, graphic, syntactic, and semantic systems). Chafe (1970) views th reconstruction of meaning as the function of all these systems together, arguing that attempts to separate them is merely a linguistic tradition. Similarly, Burke (1981) explains that it is impossible to deal with any of these systems without addressing._... the othe-rs- s--i- nc-e- t- he-.v.: a- re- interrelated. For his .o!._ art.I Sims ("- 1976)__, states that substitutions, insertions, omissions, or reversals, v.:h.ich cause the most frequent miscues, may occur at the sound, morpheme, word, phrase, and clause levels, arguing that (p.49) "In order to gain a fuller understanding of the reading process and of the miscue phenomena, one must examine miscues, not simply as changes involving individual words, but as phenomena which occur in a total language context" (cf. Mont oro 1976).
Mohammed Farghal, Rula Naji