In educational settings, students read for multiple purposes, such as preparing for an exam, practicing a new reading strategy, writing an essay, and more. Because reading is a goal-directed activity, providing students with task instructions can help them create goals for reading and develop a plan to meet these goals. In the current experiment,…

Teachers understand the importance of think-alouds, yet research shows that think-alouds may be used ineffectively in practice. Often, this results from the difficulty of explicitly sharing the inner thought processes of competent readers and writers in transferable ways for students. To our knowledge, a tool for helping preservice teachers…

Students struggling with reading in secondary school are between "learning to read" and "reading to learn." Struggling readers require metacognitive and cognitive reading skills to tackle the complexities of reading. Combining the research of worked-examples and think-aloud shaped the instructional intervention in this study.…

Reading and writing instruction involve teachers guiding students to take on the actions and thinking processes of readers and writers. Think-alouds and write-alouds are research-supported strategies that promote student growth and achievement. Although professional development strategies are outlined in the research literature on using…

Textbooks have been the subject of research within and across disciplines, but have not yet been widely studied from a disciplinary literacy perspective. Readerly agency is also understudied in disciplinary literacy. The present paper aims to illuminate both of these areas by examining facets of agency that readers demonstrated during think-aloud…

This study explores literature reading and reception of narrative texts among Swedish middle school students. Through a written assignment and a think-aloud protocol, students' comprehension and interpretation of narrative texts are investigated. The study shows that Swedish middle school students tend to focus mainly on the plot. The main…

Considering the critical role of reading strategies in L2 reading this study aimed to investigate the impact of strategy training on Turkish EFL learners' use of global reading strategies. 23 freshmen, enrolled in the ELT Department, participated in the study, and the data were collected through eye tracking and think-aloud protocols. The results…

This study examined reading tutors' interpretation of reading progress-monitoring graphs. A think-aloud procedure was used to evaluate tutors at two points in time, before and after a year of service as an AmeriCorps reading tutor. During their service, the reading tutors received extensive training and ongoing coaching. Descriptive results showed…

Reading comprehension is the goal of reading, and making inferences is vital. Authors usually expect readers to make multiple types of inferences, including anaphoric, background knowledge, predictive, and retrospective. Common core assessments include all of these, yet instructional materials focus mostly on only one type, retrospective. This…

Practitioners face many challenges when working with students who are experiencing difficulty with comprehension. The act of creating meaning with texts is complex, and comprehension is often measured in schools as a product of reading. Product assessments, such as answering questions or retelling a text, take place after reading, which makes it…

A think-aloud study investigated 7th graders' (N = 30) information processing and seeking of feedback while reading four multiple partly contradictory texts. An extreme-case analysis shows that a highly-skilled reader uses deeper strategies, such as elaboration, evaluation, and paraphrasing of less contradictory information, than a less-skilled…

The authors report on a think-aloud study of college students placed into developmental reading courses as they learned and implemented a new strategy device. The purpose was to investigate the device's potential utility for students, especially given the current practical trends in the field to move away from strategy instruction. Findings…

In second language (L2) reading strategy research, two concerns need addressing: (1) the discrepancy in assessing strategy use between written surveys and verbal reports, and (2) the effect of using strategies on readers' comprehension outcomes when different types of comprehension tasks are utilized. The present study addressed these concerns by…

This article addresses well-known and difficult problems involving reading comprehension and compliance in college courses, using a lower-level philosophy course as a case study. It draws upon both general and discipline-specific research in three promising areas for reading instruction: metacognition, modeling via "think-alouds," and…

Low-achieving adolescents are known to have difficulties with reading comprehension. This article discusses whether principles of reciprocal teaching can improve low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension in whole-classroom settings and to what extent treatment effects are dependent on implementation quality. Over the course of two years,…