Abstract
The decoding strategies used by children in developing their reading skill were studied by probing the relative importance of graphic, syntactic and semantic cues. The oral reading miscues of seven, eight and nine‐year‐old pupils from twelve county primary schools #opcovering ‘formal’, ‘semi‐formal’ and ‘informal’ schools, and of differing emphases on reading#cp were analysed. The quality of miscues was found to improve with age but not uniformly, the greatest improvement being for the semantic score and the least for graphic. Girls were found to be ahead of boys in the quality of their syntactic and semantic miscues, although the miscue x sex interaction was not significant. The miscue x school type interaction was also insignificant. The results are discussed with respect to the teaching of reading in schools.

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