WHAT THINK-ALOUDS CAN DO FOR STUDENTS:
OPENING THE WINDOW ON READING STRATEGIES
The power of think-alouds was revealed to me when I was researching for You Gotta BE the
Book(Teachers College Press, 1997). Hoping to better understand what accounted for the
difference between expert and at-risk adolescent readers, I designed a study to examine these
two kinds of readers. I discovered that the expert readers continuously and simultaneously
used ten different dimensionsof interpretive strategies and response strategies during any par-ticular reading of narratives (see box opposite). These strategies included general reading
processes but went well beyond these to include many text-and task-specific processes particular to reading narrative. The
kids who had intense difficulties with reading, on the other
hand, couldn’t identify or use a single interpretive response
strategy. With this evidence before me, I asked: How can I
help these poor readers? Where do I start? Knowing from the
expert readers that visualizingand participating in textual
worldswere two dimensions of response that were necessary
to achieving response on other, more reflective dimensions, I
chose these two strategies as a starting point. Using think-alouds, visual art, symbolic story representation, and drama, I
helped the poorer readers to visualize while they read and to
participate in a story world—to experience it as a character,
for example. Once this basic level of response was achieved,
the students were better able to use more reflective strategies,
such as inferring and elaborating.
Illuminating the Importance of Visualizing
Visualizing, I discovered, was perhaps the most obvious
characteristic of student response to any kind of text, so
much so that I’ve written that “Reading is Seeing” and that
visualizing should be added to the general processes. I’ve
BOOK NOTES
For More on Engaged
Reading
You Gotta BE the Book: Teaching
Engaged and Reflective Reading
with Adolescents (Wilhelm,
1997, Teachers College Press)
lays out the theory of engage-ment and describes how expert
adolescent readers engage with
texts by making use of ten
dimensions of response that
include various meaning-making
stances and strategies. The
book also describes how unen-gaged readers can be helped to
take on these expert stances
and strategies through various
instructional interventions such
as drama and visual art.
Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies • Scholastic Professional Books 31
also devoted a section to helping kids visualize through think-alouds in Chapter 5.
From these students, I noticed as well that readers of narrative have the particular chal-lenge of visualizing characters, settings, and events. Students who did not intensely visualize
and participate in “story worlds” did not engage with the text in other dimensions. In other
words, if we don’t help kids to visualize settings, characters, and action, then they will not be
able to reflect on story action, the ways the story was constructed, what the story means, the
author’s purpose and perspective, and a lot of other things that expert readers of narrative do.
The point is that even reading a narrative has task-specific demands, as exhibited in
the box below. (Reading informational texts also requires visualization, a kind—albeit a
different kind—of a mental model.)
Interdependent Dimensions of Literary Response for Reading Narrative
ENTERING THESTORYWORLD
• Willingness to enter a story world.
• Entering the story world through interest in story action (and interest in
character, setting, author, and other reasons).
IMAGINING THESTORYWORLD
• Seeing the story world: visualizing settings, situations, and characters.
• Relating to characters: becoming, empathizing with, and observing characters.
EXTENDING ANDCONNECTING TO THESTORYWORLD
• Elaborating on the story world: noticing and inferring, embellishing and
adding details, perhaps even creating new situations and episodes.
• Connecting: bringing and relating literature to one’s life.
REFLECTING ON THEEXPERIENCEDSTORYWORLD
• Reflecting on the significance of events (theme) and behavior (judging characters).
• Noticing and reflecting on the constructedness of text, including the author’s use
of literary conventions, and why the author has constructed the text that way.
• Recognizing reading as a transaction; includes recognizing and conversing
with author, her meaning, and her vision.
• Evaluating the author and the self as a reader; includes articulating under-standing of one’s own reading processes as part of that relationship.