If a miscue consists of more than one word, how should it be categorized?

• A. Category all words in the miscue as one miscue.
• B. Break into separate miscues.
• C. Ignore the miscue.
• D. Record as a substitution only.

Answer: (A)

A miscue that spans more than one word is treated as a single miscue. This reflects that it’s one instance of the reader’s decoding at that point in the text, often representing a chunk or phrase-level processing rather than a string of independent word-level errors. Counting it as one keeps the error rate and fluency picture accurate and allows you to analyze the reader’s processing of that chunk without inflating the number of miscues. If you split it into separate miscues, you’d overcount how often the reader erred and lose insight into how they approached larger units of text. Ignoring it would miss a real reading error, and labeling it as just a substitution would mischaracterize the nature of the error since multiple words were involved.