Critiques Of Think-alouds: What Does "authentic" Mean?

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Despite the benefits that Schriver has found from the use of think-aloud protocols and the success I have had with the technique as a peer-review strategy, critiques of the think-aloud protocol as a tool for research into cognition raise questions about how authentic students are being when they think aloud about the sense they are making of texts. Arguments about "reactivity"—whether thinking aloud actually changes what readers do when they read—may seem Cartier Replica(http://www.kopeez.com/B-Replica-Cartier-Watches-26.html) most important. James F. Strat-man and Liz Hamp-Lyons, for instance, found that those who thought aloud as they considered revisions to a text not only made a different number of changes to the text but also made different kinds of changes, suggesting that think-alouds do change the underlying cognitive processes being studied.

This concern is less of a problem in a teaching situation. In the case of the think-aloud work that students do during both the reading described and the peer-review process, it is clear that part of my aim is to help students more consciously master reading ...
... strategies. I want them to become more strategic in their reading practices and to more actively engage with the texts they read. In the directions for the read-aloud protocol, for instance, I emphasize that I want students to stop at least after every sentence, which is far more often than readers typically pause to consciously process the meaning of the texts they are reading. Recent research on peer review, though, in which the researchers observed where readers' eyes stop as they read, suggests that readers stop to process unconsciously far more frequently than at every sentence, but few of those pauses rise to the level of receiving conscious attention (Paulson, Alexander, and Armstrong).

While it may be that stopping so frequently leads to a contrived reading performance, and it certainly feels unnatural to students at first, I have found that requiring students to stop so frequently is necessary to get them into the habit of articulating their thoughts as they read, and I gradually loosen up the every-sentence requirement as students improve in their read-aloud feedback. I also provide students guidance (and, in the sequence described, practice) in focusing their thinking and comments on understanding the piece and responding to the place of what Omega Replica Watches(http://www.kopeez.com/B-Replica-Omega-Watches-51.html) they have just read in the overall text. While their reading and responses to each other's texts, therefore, will not be authentic in the sense of being exactly the responses that would go through their heads if they were reading silently, they will be authentic in the sense of being focused on meaning making.