The Self-Correction Process in Reading.
Donna R. Recht · The Reading Teacher · 1976
PICTURE YOURSELF as a teacher in a classroom. A stu dent is reading orally to you. The flow of his words is often inter rupted because he goes back to cor rect a word or a phrase on which he has erred. What do you do about it? Should you encourage or discour age self-correction in a student's oral reading? We know that most students, in fact most readers, regress to cor rect a percentage of their errors. Self-correction occurs when the reader, aware that he has made an oral reading error, moves his eyes back over previously read material and attempts to read the text cor rectly. He is either successful, pro ducing the expected response, or unsuccessful, producing an alter nate response. The value of the self-correction strategy is the subject of some dis pute. Most standardized individual reading inventories treat regres sions as oral reading errors (Spache, 1964). The oral reading er ror that the reader corrects success fully upon regression is equated with and scored the same as an omission of a word, an insertion, or a substitution. McCracken (1971) finds that the student who makes numerous errors, and self-corrects most of them, soon becomes frus trated through his lack of success and his slowness of idea intake. McCracken feels that self-correc tion should count as an error, with or without an oral regression. Others dispute this view. They feel that regressions function as a part of the correction strategy which, in turn, functions as an im portant part of the reading process. Self-correction provides evidence of the reader's awareness of and in