STRATEGY FOCUS
Interactive Read Aloud-Think Aloud
PURPOSE
The Interactive Read Aloud-Think Aloud is a whole group, active instructional strategy for modeling fluency, building reading comprehension, and developing language acquisition skills. Students will hear a challenging, interesting, and/or varied content text read aloud by a fluent reader. The reader has read the text prior to the whole group reading and has prepared questions to pause and ask students during the read aloud. The reader should also consider which skills to develop as part of the read aloud such as summarizing, predicting, inferring, and making text-to-self connections. The reader should also embed opportunities to model a Think Aloud so that students hear how proficient readers monitor their own understanding as they read.
PROCESS
- The reader determines which skills and/or standards to build as part of the Read Aloud, selects a text to read aloud as part of a shared text experie nce, and embedsquestions that develop the identified reading comprehension skills.
- The reader plans to pause periodically to ask the pre-planned, embedded questions during the reading. The questions should provide both the reader and students the opportunity to pause and ponder the text together.
- The reader determines what props, if any, will enhance the reading experience and aid in comprehension of the text and gather those for the reading aloud.
- For the Read Aloud, students should be positioned so that the text is accessible to them. The reader may decide to read from a handheld text or from a projected text. When possible, providing students with their own copy of the text is important so that students can follow along with the text as they listen.
- During the Read Aloud, the reader will pause to ask the embedded questions, conduct Think Alouds, and/or utilize the props to enhance the reading experience.
PROBING QUESTIONS
CONSIDERATIONS
- How did hearing the text read aloud help you comprehend the information?
- What techniques were used during the read aloud that helped you to comprehend the text?
- What might you change about the read aloud experience to help you in comprehending the text?
- Because a student’s listening comprehension levels may be higher than their independent reading comprehension levels, Read Alouds are important to providing students access to high-level texts.
- Students may be given the opportunity to turn and talk to a partner during the Read Aloud as a means to engage all learners in discussions around the text.
- The reader should practice reading aloud prior to the lesson. The practice will help the reader know where to pause and pose questions, at which speed to read, how to incorporate props, and plan for Think Alouds.
CONTENT APPLICATIONS
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS
To model how context clues can help determine the meaning of unknown words, the reader brings attention to context clues relevant to the unknown word during a read-aloud-think-aloud. Students then apply their understanding of using context clues to help determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.
MATHEMATICS
The teacher conducts a read-aloud-think-aloud of the thought process used when solving algebraic problems. Students then work with a partner doing think alouds with algebraic problems to show their thought process for solving the problem while the teacher listens in.
WORLD LANGUAGES
A French teacher reads aloud from the novella The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in French. The listeners will sketch in their reading notebooks the images that are generated as a result of listening to the descriptive language from the text.
SOCIAL STUDIES
The teacher conducts a read-aloud-think-aloud with a historical document to model how to use context clues to help understand the meaning of the text. Students then apply their learning as they read historical documents on their own.
SCIENCE
To help students understand a scientific article about how energy transfers in a collision, the teacher embeds questions to support students in making connections between what they observed in an investigation and what they are reading.
HEALTH & PHYSICAL EDUCATION
The teacher reads aloud the picture book Dream Big: Michael Jordan and the Pursuit of Olympic Gold by Deloris Jordan. Students make note of evidence from the text to support the big ideas of sportsmanship and conflict resolution skills.
VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS
The teacher reads a monologue in a variety of ways (angrily, quietly, different dialects, etc.) and discusses how the same monologue can communicate different messages based on presentation.
CAREER & TECHNICAL EDUCATION
In a health science class, the teacher conducts a read-aloud-think aloud from a physiology text and pauses through to show how the text relates to the body.
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