Oral Reading Miscue Analysis of Cross-Domain ESP Reading

This research aimed to investigate ESP oral reading miscues by 3 major groups reading three domain-specific texts from qualitative/quantitative, integrative and direct perspectives via Goodman’s Reading Miscue Inventory (2005, Y.M. Goodman). The three different domain-specific texts were justified as equivalent in terms of readability, vocabulary frequency, rhetorical organization, genre, level of the domain-specific knowledge. The informants were 36 freshmen with equivalent English proficiency from three different fields, including Pharmacy, English and Business. Their oral miscues were inspected in terms of MPHW, meaning construction, grammatical relationship, graphic similarity, and sound similarity for cross-domain comparisons. The result indicated the effect of domain familiarity on ESP oral reading miscues. The informants significantly made fewer miscues and attained higher meaning construction in domain-familiar texts than in domain-unfamiliar texts with exceptions following a consistent tendency. That is, in addition to domain-familiarity, the MPHW and the meaning construction could also be conditioned by pronunciation problems and domain-distance, respectively. On the other hand, no similar significant findings were found on grammatical relationship, graphic similarity and sound similarity probably due to the three groups’ equivalent language proficiency, controlled by the study.