on think alouds

Those of us who have had the chance of carrying out some research in our own school environment know how beneficial it is for everybody involved: the teacher-researcher may recognise the problematic areas in her students’ learning and work out possible solutions, whereas the students themselves may learn from the process of research as well as from the improved techniques of their teacher. This is why teachers should be encouraged to carry out small-scale investigations themselves so that they have a better idea of their students’ learning habits and the problems the students encounter while grappling with the intricate system of the foreign language

Think-aloud as a research method

One of the methods researchers use to get a clearer picture of what learners generally do while reading in a foreign language is think aloud. This is one type of verbal reports, obtained from the readers during reading (Cavalcanti, 1987). Think-aloud means that readers report their thoughts while reading, but they are not expected to analyse their behaviour as in introspection (Cohen, 1987). By means of asking their subjects to say out loud whatever goes through their minds, researchers hope to get a more direct view of the mental processes readers are engaged in while reading (Rankin, 1988).

Verbal reports and think-aloud protocols have been widely used in both L1 and L2 reading research with the aim of tapping the mental processes of readers in different situations. The purpose of the different studies has been to 

• develop a taxonomy of reading strategies (e.g. Anderson, 1991; Olshavsky, 1977), 
• compare first and foreign language reading and find evidence of strategy transfer from the native to the foreign language (e.g. Sarig, 1987), 
• identify the reading strategies of ‘good’ and ‘poor’ readers (e.g. Block, 1986), 
• investigate the effects of prior knowledge on reading comprehension (e.g. Pritchard, 1990), and 
• describe strategies used in taking reading comprehension tests (e.g. Anderson, Bachman, Perkins & Cohen, 1991). 

for us, what do we want to investigate ?.

to find out how students naturally make sense of texts they read 

in the process 

to clarify if the lrf works as a model that represents holistic reading of a text 

to see how we can develop interventions support student understanding of texts starting from what they themselves bring to the reading process

Think aloud as pedagogical tool 

Think aloud as research tool

Think aloud as metacognitive learning tool 

As soon as the text gets more difficult due to its topic, organisation, poor writing or unfamiliar writing style, reading starts to resemble a problem-solving task and verbalisation can produce information other than the actual text. This is why think-aloud is particularly suitable for examining the strategies of those poor readers who encounter difficulties when trying to read an unfamiliar text (e.g. Olshavsky, 1977).