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
Students are given an excerpt from the play Macbeth. The teacher has practiced a read aloud of a scene between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and reads aloud, bringing life to the characters.
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.
SCIENCE
As an introduction to renewable energy sources, the teacher reads aloud the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba. The teacher embeds questions to support vocabulary acquisition around unfamiliar words related to renewable energy sources.
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.
Sources