Why Is It Important To Think Aloud

The think aloud technique for improving reading skills in people of all ages is beneficial in many ways. It not only gives the learner an opportunity to experience how and what other readers understand and conceptualize about what they are reading but also so that they can strive to expand their own level of thought process for their own reading. Very new or poorly skilled readers may struggle to just read the words of a text correctly with very little concept of the meaning. They may benefit from the think aloud by bringing meaning and understanding to the words together in a very elemental way. Eventually this process of reading and understanding would occur simultaneously. For more advanced readers, the think aloud can help trigger a number

172) of a good reader and how they monitor and improve their reading comprehension. The teacher introduces seven key strategies for the students to adopt. The seven strategies are to “create mental images, use background knowledge, ask questions, make inferences, determine the most important ideas or themes, synthesize information, and “fix-up””(Migyanka, Policastro, & Lui, 2005, p. 172). A good reader uses all seven strategies. Teachers can help with this learning process and promote the use of the strategies by providing the students with quality literature. While teachers teach students the basics of doing think alouds, it is important to provide students with sufficient opportunities for sharing, discussing, and creating their own think alouds collaboratively (Baumann, Jones, & Seifert-Kessell, 1993). Providing children with the opportunities to make meaning of a topic in a social condition is a useful way of agreeing on comprehension strategies while thinking aloud. This also promotes working together and collective discussion between students, and also with the teacher. Students assume ownership and responsibility for their own comprehension. Further think alouds can be implemented in various instructional

These objectives themselves are benefits of an effective think aloud, and lead to a students understanding and ability to retain information within written texts. Compared to other instructional activities to improve comprehension of texts, like modelling, prompting, or giving directions, think alouds differ by encouraging students to use a wide range of strategies. Therefore, performing effective think alouds has been proven to be a successful practice used by teachers to explain how expert readers (themselves) extract comprehension processes separately and collectively, while describing why a specific thought process would be efficient in getting past confusion or difficulties (Israel & Block, 2004, p. 154). Once students have the knowledge to perform think alouds, it induces their metacognitive awareness, the ability to think about one’s own thinking, and is a crucial component of learning. This allows students to assess their level of comprehension and choose a strategy to greater their