Think Aloud Reading Strategies

  So much of teaching reading is, as we've discussed in class, making the invisible visible. Beers explores a strategy in teaching skills for engaging with the text through "think-alouds". This strategy of explaining the thinking process that occurs during reading helps students understand how actively engaged they should be in order to achieve meaningful comprehension. It also, as Beers (2003) points out, "not only helps the teacher understand why or how a student is having difficulty with a text but also allows the student to analyze how he is thinking about his reading" (p. 119). This can help an instructor identify patterns and better understand what the issues with reading may be, whether on the individual or class-wide level.

In terms of practice, think-alouds can be executed in variations, allowing for options with student response. One possibility of the think aloud could take shape in free-writing. The teacher would have scaffolding the process and explained expectations of these think alouds, but students could then have the opportunity to free-write about the associations they are making, the questions they have, etc. Students could then optionally share their writing aloud with a partner. This variation allows for concrete writing of one's own thoughts instead of just speaking aloud to a recorder. An extension would be to take down a list of connections, questions, inferences, predictions from the class on the board. Students would see the variety and extensiveness of a personal response to text, demonstrating the range of responses to texts as well as commonalities. Student could then visually catalogue their peers' relationships with the text as in comparison to their own and begin to understand what may be personal about reading and what may be universal about reading, not to mention these difference as they directly relate to the specific text they are working with. They are also physically creating their "internal text" - something essential to the reading process.

Another helpful strategy in think-alouds might be to provide photocopies of the text the class is working with and allow students to write directly on the text. This could be a way to transfer, visually, the internal text onto the pages of the actual text they are reading by physically putting their thoughts onto the page. This action would function to make this thinking process, something invisible, into written words on a page, therefore visible. The more and more these students use these strategies, Beers (2003) states, "that internal dialogue with the text becomes more natural, proving to students the connection between reading and thinking" (p. 123).

I wonder about a "popcorn" function of think-alouds, having students read a text aloud using the reading strategy of "popcorn" to distribute the reading responsibility to the class. The teacher could write on the board the "think-aloud" of each student on a copy of the text. This would keep readers engaged by the "popcorn" rotation as well as asking them to pay attention to the "reading voice" and the "reaction voice". Could this work? Or is it too ambitious? How much scaffolding would it require? Would students actually gain anything from the content they are reading, or should it be done with a text that is not necessarily essential to their learning (i.e. a magazine article, or something more fun)?