How Can a Think Aloud Help Make the Invisible, Visible?

The Think Aloud Strategy makes the invisible process of reading and making meaning visible through a metacognitive conversation. The teacher and/or student says out loud what they are thinking as they interact with a text. A Think Aloud is an effective way to model how a comprehension strategy works by articulating why and how it is used to understand text.

Watch the following video, where a volunteer working with an adult learner models what she is thinking when she reads a passage from text:

Through this process, the learner can see how the volunteer makes meaning of the text while she is reading.

Thinking aloud can feel awkward at first (for everyone).🥴 Some teachers like to prepare a script and practice before engaging students in the process. Others do think alouds cold without any preparation. It can be challenging to employ strategies on a text that is, in reality, very easy for you to read yourself, so we have to think about common roadblock areas students may encounter when reading the same text. The Literacy Information and Communication System (LINCS) has a good example of a possible script for thinking aloud a text coding strategy:

Modeling Example.PNG

In this video from the National Center for Families Learning, watch how the teacher thinks aloud to model how she decides what to code when reading text:

A useful step can be to model comprehension skills and strategies through a think aloud while students listen and identify what they are hearing. Depending on the level of students, you can focus on demonstrating a single strategy or several strategies. Learning for Justice has a great example of a tool for this type of activity that could be adapted for different levels: Think Aloud Checklist.pdf

If you would like students to work in partners or small groups to practice their own thinking aloud process, provide scaffolding, such as a bookmark with sentence stems or post anchor charts with sentence stems. The Reading Apprenticeship framework has an example of a "think aloud" bookmark here: RFU Think Aloud Bookmark.pdf

Remember that a key goal of using the think aloud strategy is to demonstrate what happens "behind the scenes" when effective readers work to comprehend a text.

Click "Next" to read about factors that impact how we construct meaning from text and the kinds of meaning we construct.