SCET Journal 2020/2021

« Language Matters

teachers and researchers still need to explore more in this area, especially for the miscue analysis of bilingual readers. For bilingual readers who are de- veloping their biliteracies, it is essential for teachers to revalue their reading processes and explore more about how to support bilingual readers’ reading and meaning constructing processes. Methodology The southern city where this study was conduct- ed has a population of 129,482, and 8.18% of the population are bilingual speakers (World Population Review, 2021). The population of Chinese language learners is growing. There are three Chinese Mandarin /English immersion programs in town. Qiao’s school has approximately 730 students. 41% of the students are Caucasian, 38% are African American, and 6% are Asian American. Most children come from mono- lingual families. When this study took place, Qiao

vides for the study of each reading miscue in relation to other miscues within the sentence and within the entire text, evaluating how the text and the reader’s prior knowledge influence the reading” (Goodman et al., 2005, p. 131). Then the first author selected a few high-quality miscues that did not change the meaning of the texts and a few low-quality miscues that changed the meaning of the texts to confer with the reader in three respective Retrospective Miscue Analysis (Goodman & Marek, 1996; Moore & Gilles, 2005) discussion sessions about the bilingual reading process. A constant comparative approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) was used to compare the reader’s miscues in English and Chinese, and major themes emerged from the data. Findings Qiao’s Reading Views Qiao reported in the interview that reading in En-

was a nine-year-old Chinese American girl, and her home language was mainly Chi- nese Mandarin. The first author met with Qiao via an online platform every other week in fall 2021. Each meeting was around one hour. Qiao was inter- viewed about her reading in two languages, borrowing questions from the Burke Reading Interview (Good- man et al., 2005). Then, Qiao read and retold three fictional texts including: 1) English text (624 words), 2) Chinese text with Pinyin (261 words, Figure 1), and 3) Chinese text without Pinyin (322 words, Figure 2). The Chinese texts are selected from the second grade Chinese Language Arts textbook used in mainland China. After each reading session, the first author marked and ana- lyzed the miscues following the in-depth procedure “which pro-

glish was “for fun” and it was fascinat- ing most of the time. She liked reading comic books and often made connec- tions to the books she read. Also, she enjoyed drawing a lot and shared that she and her friends were trying to write their own comic books. In contrast, Qiao believed that reading in Chinese was “for study” even though her home language was Chinese. She reported that Chinese reading was more difficult because sometimes she could not understand the text very well even though she could recognize most words. She thought reading in Chinese was a learning process compared to read- ing in English. She did not share any books she found interesting to read in Chinese. She mentioned that she always relied on Chinese pinyin, the phonetic system, to read aloud the texts. The pinyin letters were similar to English letters. Use of Language Cueing Systems Table 1 shows the results from the in-depth procedure of the three read- ing sessions.

Figure 1 Chinese Text with Pinyin

Figure 2 Chinese Text without Pinyin

South Carolina English Teacher

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