Thinking Aloud Essay -- Reading Education Learning Essays

Thinking Aloud Reading comprehension may be the most important skill for any student to acquire and is therefore an area of particular interest to educators. Without adequate comprehension skills, students are limited in their reading, analytical and occupational abilities. To many, including the student’s themselves, comprehension or â€Å"good reading† skills begin and end with simple decoding. It is thought that if students can ‘read’ and define the vocabulary they are reading, then they also comprehend what is read. True comprehension goes far beyond decoding, however. True comprehension requires visualization of a text, predicting events in the text, making inferences about the text and clarifying what is not understood about the text in order to lead to higher level thought processes such as personally connecting with the text. Reluctant, beginning or low-skilled readers often do not have the ability to visualize, predict, inference or clarify what they are reading and so they do not truly comprehend what the text is or what it means. Too often, these readers do not understand that â€Å"good readers† go through a series of mental processes in order to comprehend the text in ways which the low-level readers never even imagined. As educators, it is our job to show reluctant, beginning or low-skilled readers what these processes are and how they work in an attempt to boost the self-confidence and independence of these readers. One excellent way to set about this is through a strategy called a â€Å"Think Aloud†. The â€Å"Think Aloud† strategy is a teaching strategy which goes beyond teacher lecturing and is actually an exchange between teacher and student. First, the teacher demonstrates and encourages t... ...pecially designed to help dependent, beginning or low-level readers to see and understand exactly what it is that â€Å"good readers† do. Showing them this breaks down barriers which the students have built up against reading and comprehension. Most of all, the Think- Aloud is a more than sufficient method for giving students the skills they need to succeed in any reading situation they may encounter, whether it be in Social Studies class or the all important, ever watchful, standardized test. Works Cited Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2003. Oster, Leslie. â€Å"Using the Think-Aloud for Reading Instruction.† The Reading Teacher 55 (September 2001): 64- 9. Wilhelm, Jeffrey D. â€Å"Think Alouds Boost Reading Comprehension.† Instructor 111 (2001): 26-8.