10 Instructor and Student Think-Alouds
What is a Think Aloud?
A think-aloud is a reading strategy by which readers orally express their thinking as they are reading a text. These verbalizations could be thoughts, predictions, questions, connections, or reflections.
In a reading class, think-alouds can be used by the teacher or by the students themselves. There are several advantages of using think-alouds in the classroom:
Advantages:
- When teachers use think-alouds, students will notice the instructor’s cognitive process. In other words, as you observe your teacher doing think-alouds, you will realize how good readers become engaged with the text and achieve a deeper understanding of ideas.
- When students use think-alouds, they create communities of readers in the classroom. Groups of students can use think-alouds to monitor their comprehension, which can act as a form of assessment. Student think-alouds can benefit the speaker since they establish a link between oral language and reading and writing. Simultaneously, listeners see models of active reading and reflect upon the verbalized thoughts, which may spark discussions.
- When used with difficult texts, think-alouds slow down the reading process and allow you to monitor your own understanding of complex ideas.
- Consistent practice with think-alouds helps you internalize effective reading strategies and develop metacognitive skills.
- Think-alouds encourage you to approach texts critically, fostering a deeper understanding of the material.
How to Use Think Alouds
The basic premise to produce successful think-alouds is that you, as a reader, will engage in deep thinking while you are reading a text. An engagement with the reading will generate verbal reflections. Here are some reading skills for think-alouds that you may want to use:
- Draw on your background knowledge
- Visualize the events of a text as you read
- Make predictions of what might happen next
- Figure out vocabulary
- Recognize confusion
- Connecting what you read to something else in the text, another text, or your own experience
- Recognize a text’s structure/organization
- Identify/recognize the purpose of a paragraph, subtopic, or the entire reading.
- Pose questions: Did I misread something? Is this a flashback? Did the author just change the idea? What does this word mean? What’s the relationship between these two subtopics? What does “it” refer to in this sentence?
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