Tired of hearing about "complex text"? Bothered by the pushy messages about "challenge"? This book is for you! Unlike the many other materials on text complexity, this one focuses on specific comprehension skills that students need in order to really engage with text. This book will help elementary school teachers equip their…

One way teachers can improve students' reading comprehension is to teach them to think while reading, questioning the text and carrying on an inner conversation. This involves: choosing the text for questioning; introducing the strategy to the class; modeling thinking aloud and marking the text with stick-on notes; and allowing time for guided…

Describes a 10-lesson instructional program for teaching students to think aloud during reading as a means to help them monitor reading comprehension and to address comprehension breakdowns. Presents a sample lesson, and offers suggestions for how teachers might adapt, modify, or extend think alouds in a classroom reading program or in content…

Describes an activity (the first assignment in a graduate reading course for teachers) which provides teachers with the opportunity to develop awareness of their own reading processes by thinking aloud about the strategies they use when reading texts that are difficult for them. (SR)

Outlines procedures used in an investigation of college students' thinking aloud protocols and discusses the framework developed for differentiating student-text interactions and identifying the common problems of less able comprehenders. Suggests ways to use protocols to look into the ways students comprehend texts, to identify comprehension…

Focuses on three ideas pertaining to modeling and thinking aloud, presents examples of how the processes can be applied to teaching both text comprehension and study strategies to college developmental readers, and discusses reasons for using modeling and thinking aloud in the classroom. (FL)

Describes an informal assessment procedure that uses think alouds (readers' verbal self-reports about their thinking processes) to obtain information about how they attempt to construct meaning from text. (MG)

A think-aloud instructional program was developed to help students acquire the ability to monitor their reading comprehension and to employ various strategies to deal with comprehension breakdowns. Several research studies indicate that comprehension monitoring abilities discriminate successful readers from less successful ones and that…

The reading comprehension program described in this lesson introduces the components of think-alouds and text interactions, and helps students to develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks. During two 45-minute lessons, students will: explore the use of the think-aloud strategy; vocalize interactions with texts;…

Outlines a model for understanding the second-language reading process. Uses errors in comprehension to illustrate how the reading comprehension process works. Discusses pedagogical implications and suggestions for teaching students to develop and practice better comprehension strategies using think-alouds. (RS)

Upper-elementary students encounter a sometimes dizzying array of traditional and nontraditional texts both in and outside of the classroom. This practical handbook helps teachers in grades 4-6 harness the instructional potential of fiction, poetry, and plays; informational texts; graphic novels; digital storytelling; Web-based and multimodal…

How do some students extract complex information from advanced reading materials while others struggle to find the meaning of even simple passages? What characteristics do strategic readers exhibit that others don't possess? Unlocking the cognitive strategies of exceptional readers means finding ways to teach every student to read strategically,…