Kenneth Goodman
In the early 1960s Kenneth S. Goodman began studying the reading of authentic texts by urban and rural young people. His earliest miscue research, published in 1965, is probably the most widely replicated study in reading research history. But it was his article, "Reading: a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game" (1967), that began a revolution moving away from a view of reading as rapid accurate sequential word recognition to an understanding of reading as a process of constructing meaning - making sense - of print. That research is part of the basis for the whole language movement and disagreements over his conclusions about the nature of reading fuel the current "reading wars." (Stenhouse Publishers, 2003)
Goodman defined reading as: “a receptive psycholinguistic process wherein the actor uses strategies to create meaning from text” (Goodman, 1988). Basically, the study of reading looks at translating a linguistic surface representation (text) into thought. Goodman based much of his theory on analysing miscues (mistakes) in texts being read-aloud. He believed that efficient readers minimize dependence on visual detail, but focused his theories on the interactions of reader and text. Basic physical sensory information (the physiological process) is cycled into deeper levels of cognitive processes.
Cycles– readers move from text to understanding through cycles of deeper processing, moving from optical, to perceptual, to syntactic, to meaning
Cognitive Processes of the brain used in reading are:
• recognition / initiation – the brain must recognise text and initiate reading
• prediction – anticipates and predicts as it seeks order and significance of input
• confirmation – verification of predictions or disconfirmation
• correction – reprocessing when it finds inconsistencies or disconfirmations
• termination – formal ending of reading act
N.B.: Goodman treats these processes as sequential, whereas later models may not
This limited view, however, was still an improvement upon Noam Chomsky’s ‘generative grammar’, which lacked explanation of top-down processing. Goodman also promoted the use of ‘natural texts’, believing that language must be studied in context. This follows from his postulated three sources of linguistic information: symbols (characters), language structure (syntax), and semantic (meaning).