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Wilhelm, Jeffrey D. (2001). Improving Comprehension with
Think-Aloud Strategies. New York: Scholastic Inc.
176 pp.
$14.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-439-21859-4
Reviewed by Wendy M. Strachan
Simon Fraser University
August 20, 2002
The 2000 report of the National Reading Panel,
Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment
of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its
Implications for Reading Instruction proposed six major
strategies for improving text comprehension, itself one of
five skill areas claimed to be required for successful
reading. The research endorsed in the report suggested
that "explicit teaching techniques are particularly
effective for comprehension strategy instruction" (Center
for the Improvement of Early Reading Instruction CIERA,
2001). In the context of this report and the onset of a
renewed national campaign to improve children's ability to
read and to improve the teaching of reading, Jeffrey
Wilhelms' modestly priced and practical guide to a useful
strategy will have much appeal to teachers. The think-
aloud method of making thinking either audible or visible
has a long history in research on composing and is widely
applied to determine usability of texts as well as to
uncover the processes by which readers construct meaning.
Wilhelm brings this approach to the classroom as an
instructional strategy for showing young readers what it
means to comprehend a text. This collection of ideas, the
first in a series to be entitled Action Strategies for
Readers, is presented so that teachers will be able
both to implement the think-aloud strategies effectively
and feel confident that research confirms the underlying
reasoning and method. Teachers will also appreciate that
the publisher has generously given permission to photocopy
material in the book as long as it is for personal
classroom use. Like others in the series, this book
addresses classroom teachers directly and Wilhelm advises
them that it will "help provide you with flexible
techniques for giving the right kind of help to your
students, assistance that will move them through the four
steps of modeling, apprenticeship, scaffolded use, and
independent use, so that they can become confident,
motivated and engaged readers (p.15).
In an enthusiastic and confident tone and style,
Wilhelm situates himself as first and foremost a teacher
and illustrates all his claims about the value and use of
think-aloud strategies with examples from his own teaching.
He does not ignore theory, however. Wilhelm takes
Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal
development as the basis for his claims about the
importance of explicit teaching of strategies, proposing
that "the most important thing we can teach our students is
how to learn. Or, put another way, the most powerful thing
we can teach is strategic knowledge, a knowledge of the
procedures people use to learn, to think, to read, and to
write" (p.7). He goes on to claim that, according to
Vygotsky, "what is learned must be taught (p.8). The
think-aloud becomes a valuable tool when the teacher is
able to recognize both what a young reader is able and not
able to do and thoughtfully provides a strategic model of
how to move to a new level of comprehension – thus teaches
what needs to be learned at the developmentally appropriate
moment. The key terms associated with the ZPD become the
section headings which sequence the steps in the strategy
teaching processes in each chapter.
In the opening chapters, Wilhelm illustrates how this
process works in an example from his teaching where he has
determined that a student is reading for literal meaning
but not making inferences. He takes the student through
the think-aloud process, explaining its purposes, modeling
it, giving him guided practice, scaffolding him into more
independent reading and then moving him on to a book he
would read on his own. In this example, Wilhelm offers a
substantial excerpt of a think-aloud transcript: he points
out features to notice in what he is doing and draws
attention to the wordings he uses to indicate the 'mental
moves' he is making as he reads. Indeed, much of the
language he uses to explain his processes and reasoning in
this and the examples that appear throughout the book is
language that would be useful for teachers to imitate as
they begin to introduce the strategies themselves. Each
excerpt clearly illustrates the teacher-reader's attention
to word meaning and the interpretive and predictive nature
of reading. Each excerpt is thus a useful example of how
to demonstrate successful reading practices. Reinforcement
is a necessary follow-up to the initial learning and
practice. Wilhelm sets out a variety of useful strategies
that replicate but do not simply repeat the practice. By
experimenting with a range of alternative ways of
representing their thinking, students are encouraged to
keep working on the strategy but they are also at the same
time transforming and modifying it. Each suggested
alternative is illustrated and exemplified with anecdotes,
wordings for explanation and actual samples of children's
work to make it readily accessible for teacher use.
These opening chapters, over a third of the book,
define the 'think aloud', explain its purposes, and
illustrate how it can be used as a strategy in explicit
teaching of reading comprehension. The subsequent chapters
refine and focus these purposes to show the various ways in
which readers need to interact with texts. The logic of
this sequence raises pedagogical questions about how
teachers think about learners and the learning process when
they decide what they will teach. The opening chapters
present a teaching process which is predicated on
psychological theories of effective teaching. They are
designated 'general' and 'what all readers do'. Wilhelm
suggests that teaching the think-aloud to model general
processes of reading such as predicting and visualizing
will get students started and ready to move toward the
"task and text –specific processes covered in later
chapters". The subsequent chapters, Three through Seven
shift attention to the learner and learners' needs. The
reasoning seems to imply that the opening chapters will
convince teachers to 'have a go' and the remaining chapters
could be read as setting out some priorities in planning
the use of the think aloud. Although there are admonitions
about determining learner needs in the early chapters, and
an illustration of a need that a think aloud is directed
to, there is a misleading omission of attention to how the
teacher might determine those needs and discussion of a
logical sequence of instruction. That would follow
assessment. In the national context, not only of a thrust
toward teaching reading more effectively but also of
assessment-driven teaching, these omissions are quite
unfortunate and represent reading comprehension as a
process of somewhat arbitrarily applying generic skills
rather than as a process that is deeply social and situated
in a larger learning and teaching context. The later
chapters, despite some anomalies, nonetheless offer
teachers practical applications, clear instructions, and
fully annotated and explained examples of uses of think-
alouds.
In Chapter 3, titled "Author's craft and reader's
role: Using free-response and cued think-alouds to show the
link between these processes" Wilhelm suggests methods for
determining what strategies students currently use as they
read. These approaches are useful, he suggests, for
assessment as well as learning purposes if undertaken early
in the year, because they provide a benchmark against which
to compare progress as students acquire more strategies.
It is also a way for the teacher to get an overall picture
of what the student already does. Indeed, this information
seems crucial for both student and teacher and should not
be merely a helpful option. As in the previous chapters,
Wilhelm illustrates the concepts with anecdotes and
transcripts that enable the teacher to visualize the
contexts of use and the applications. Recommended
practices are supplemented with guiding lists of prompts to
be used to invite the kinds of responses he has
exemplified. These are phrased as sets of questions, each
of which might trigger ideas. So, for instance, there is a
list of prompts to guide students' reflection on the
strategies they currently use in free response:
Characterize your reading of this passage.
How did you personally read this; was it visual, like
watching a movie? Did you ask a lot of questions, was
your think-aloud like an interview of the text/ did
you make a lot of predictions? Did you make a lot of
personal connections? Was it emotional?
Or, for the same kind of reflection:
Why do you think you read the passage in
this particular way? What did you learn about yourself
from the think aloud? What kinds of things grabbed
your attention or interested you and what does that
tell about you?
Also in this same chapter, Wilhelm introduces
strategies to help students become aware both that
and how their responses result from textual
regularities. This concept seems critical and fundamental
to the think aloud process: it enables students to
recognize the limitations the text imposes on
interpretation. Since different texts require the reader
to pick up certain kinds of cues in order to fully
comprehend them – such as noticing headings and graphs in
types of informational text and beginnings, physical
descriptions, names and so on in narrative fiction, Wilhelm
invites students to revisit texts they are reading using
the think-aloud approach and determine what cues prompt
their think-aloud responses, what is it in the text that
drew their attention. Having identified the relationship
between what is in the text and how they respond, students
are invited to consciously attend to textual cues by
underlining them and making predictions as they continue
reading. They then discuss the cues they notice and make
lists for future reference of what cues prompt what
responses in what types of text. (Wilhelm also supplies
lists). Finally, they are invited to reflect on how they
use these same strategies in other situations in their
lived experience, thereby making a transfer of what they
have learned.
Chapter Four, "Navigating meaning: Using think-alouds
to help readers monitor comprehension," could be seen to
follow conceptually from the previous one, shifting the
focus from the local level of textual cues to the global
level of overall development in the text. Wilhelm shows
how to use think-alouds both to assess students' awareness
of their own thinking and understanding and help them learn
how to monitor it. They are encouraged to summarize what
they have read, notice if they are losing track or getting
confused, consult lists of 'fixit' techniques if they are
stumped. The lists for self-monitoring and the strategies
for what to do are quite long and would be of most use to
teachers. They could be broken down for students or
classified in groups perhaps to make them less daunting and
encourage thoughtful use rather than rote checking off.
In Chapter Five, "Intensified Involvement: getting
visual, emotional and verbal with texts," Wilhelm stresses
the importance of visualizing during reading as a
prerequisite for the kinds of reflection and thinking
students need to do to make text meaningful. Doing a
"visual think-aloud" includes a variety of activities such
as picture mapping, mind-movies, tableaux and sketching as
well as verbalizing, followed by discussion. Verbal
response includes what Wilhelm treats as 'conversing with
the author' and makes the important point that the first
task is to know what the writer is telling you and to
understand them on their terms—to represent accurately
before moving to respond or critique or talk to the writer
in some way. This section appears to complement the
earlier attention to the cues that texts provide for
interpretation but distanced as it is and not conceptually
linked to a distinction between what texts do and what
readers do, it appears to be simply another discrete
strategy. Furthermore, the author conversations assume a
different level of reading comprehension and engagement
from the other strategies which are being recommended to
assist comprehension—these are think-alouds but they
assume comprehension has already occurred or is occurring,
though that distinction is not made explicitly.
In Chapter 6, New Genres, New Reading Moves: Using
Think-Alouds To Teach Students About Text Types and Text
Features, Wilhelm introduces concepts of genre and text
types and applies a think-aloud to the various genres he
names. This seems to be quite a different process from
his earlier illustrations and demands knowledge and
language which the earlier strategies do not. He appears
to have assembled ideas from a range of sources and pressed
them into service to expand the capacity of the think-aloud
as a strategy for improving reading. He is shifting
attention away from specific features like wordings and
what we react to and focusing on larger structures which
lead to traditional kinds of questions about author's
purpose and main ideas and topic identification, so the
talk is about the text as text not about the process of
making meaning of the text. Again echoing earlier
attention to cues in the text, here there is an imposing of
genre features upon the text to notice. The difference is
that the reader now searches for the presence of certain
genre features rather than derives them through attentive
reading and analysis. The questions Wilhelm proposes to
guide this search construct genres formulaically and bypass
the thinking of the readers who, if they are using
strategies suggested earlier in the text, would be able to
notice and respond to these features independently and thus
engage actively in a meaning-making process.
This chapter offers possibilities that are not fully
developed nor particularly convincing on either theoretical
or practical grounds. If one wants to examine genres or
forms of argument in different kinds of text, other
resources and methods can more effectively take account of
the social contexts which produce them and the rhetoric
which influences their style, content and structure. The
questions and guidelines in these later sections might be
better used as ideas for what kinds of information to
generate with students rather than as questions to apply to
a text since they are all derived from analysis of the text
and the meaning-making processes but it is by going through
that process that students will develop expertise in how to
do it.
Overall, Wilhelm offers compelling ways of using
think-aloud strategies in teaching reading comprehension.
The detailed explanations and examples would enable a
teacher to embark on using the strategies with confidence.
Despite that endorsement, however, I found myself extremely
dissatisfied with the editing which was a disservice to the
writer and a frustration to this reader: references are not
consistently listed in the bibliography; Rabinovitch, for
instance, is cited for one book on p. 80 and a different
one on p.102 but only the latter is listed in the
bibliography; sometimes I found myself constructed as an
outsider being addressed by invisible expert who talks
about someone else 'the teacher' e.g. "the teacher needs
to provide…for students" A bit later in the same
paragraph, the writer becomes visible: "for example, I
would … I look…." then, in the next paragraph, we are in an
I-you relationship: "remember, modeling doesn't stop after
you've introduced a strategy." Spelling had not been
checked carefully: wield is spelled both wield and weild on
the same page and so on.
Wilhelm interprets Vygotsky to say that "what is
learned must be taught." Perhaps this is another of the
editor's slips, but I think few of us would agree that what
we have learned has always been an outcome of teaching.
While we may appreciate the intent of representing
Vygotsky's complex message in this simplifying way, I think
it is a signal that focusing too much on teaching can get
in the way of learning and we need to be always cautious
about adopting a plenitude of strategies that can blinker
us to what children already do quite successfully without
being "taught." Teachers thirst for security in methods is
understandable in times when demands for accountability and
standardized testing threaten their trust in their own
observation and experience. The think-aloud is an
intensive, self-consciousness-inducing approach to teaching
reading comprehension that would help children become aware
of what they are doing as they read and why. Provided it
is used in developmentally appropriate ways and
judiciously, not mechanically, too frequently or routinely,
it could be a key to more engaged and satisfying reading
for all children. Wilhelm undeniably offers a richly
illustrated testimony to its power.
About the Reviewer
Wendy Strachan, PhD., is Director of the Centre for
Writing-Intensive Learning at Simon Fraser University in
Vancouver, British Columbia. She previously taught
language arts in the Faculty of Education at Western
Washington University. She has used the think-aloud
protocol as both a research and teaching tool for helping
students understand genre conventions and respond to each
other's writing.
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