Benefits For Students

By Author: Jordon
Total Articles: 91
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While the read-aloud protocol technique by itself offers some benefits to students, the technique as part of a sequence of instruction including think-alouds of published texts offers more. According to Schriver ("Teaching"), whose reader-protocol teaching inspired the read-aloud protocol, reading think-alouds of readers making sense of texts can improve students' ability to pinpoint and diagnose aspects of a text that would cause readers difficulty. She begins Breitling Replica Watches with texts produced and "published" outside of the classroom context and with think-aloud protocols of readers from the intended audiences of the pieces. Working with upper-division college students in advanced composition classes, Schriver designed a series of ten lessons based on reader protocols of "problematic" texts in which students read the texts, predicted the "words, phrases, sentences, sections . . . that they felt would cause a lay reader trouble in understanding the text," and explained what problem would be caused for the reader by the text. Students then read think-aloud ...
... protocols of readers trying to make sense of the text. By the end of the ten lessons, students in the experimental group improved in their ability to predict text sections that would cause readers difficulty and "diagnose" the problems those text segments would cause.

As Schriver herself mentions, though, her study did not examine whether students actually improved in their production of texts that responded to readers or in their revision of their own texts to address potential reader concerns. It is in these aspects of student performance that the sequence I describe may help students improve. Be-cause they have experienced the distance that Schriver describes in reading published texts and then applied the same strategies to the texts they are working to revise, students become more proficient not only at recognizing problematic text sections but also at improving them.

Returning to the think-aloud strategies they have used while reading has additional benefits for students. As readers, it reinforces the strategies, pro-viding students practice in a different context, which will help them transfer their use of these strategies into everyday reading activities. As writers, the practice helps them associate their texts more strongly with the published texts. Hearing their writing read in the same way they have heard published writing read can reinforce students' sense of authorship that they are writing to communicate and must consider how their decisions affect readers. When I use this strategy with college students, they Cartier Replica begin to talk about their writing much more frequently in terms of decision-making and the responses they hope to effect in readers.