Institute/Session Summary:

Because of their maturity, experience with a variety of everyday "texts," and problem-solving abilities, adult students are often expected to be well-equipped to approach university-level "text" with highly developed strategies, conscious engagement techniques, and automatic processing skills.  In actual classes, however, adults do not often display such sophisticated behaviors.  What many adult students need is help improving their text comprehension monitoring skills, especially when confronting the discourse barriers often found in academic "texts."  The field-specific nature of many disciplinary "texts" can make them difficult, at best, to understand.  To improve adult students' chances of becoming acculturated in a particular discipline requires that they be shown, be allowed to practice, and be allowed to apply strategies to approach, read (listen, view), interpret, organize, and generally use discipline-/field-specific information.  One effective technique, which instructors can model then students can practice and apply, is the think-aloud.  This metacognitive strategy, which originated as the verbalization of the reader's interaction with written text, has many uses in the content-area classroom, where students encounter and are expected to engage with many forms of "text."

This half-day pre-conference institute, which is appropriate for all content area instructors who assign reading (listening, viewing, hand-on participation) and expect their students to effectively use "text" messages, and which is facilitated by a university instructor with over 30 years experienc developing and teaching developmental composition and reading comprehension improvement courses, explores the think-aloud technique to improve text comprehension as students are shown how the disciplinary expert interacts with and responds to text.  Participants will be initially engaged when they complete a short survey of their attitudes toward and their expectations of their students, especially with regard to their students’ preparedness to navigate discipline-specific material.  Interactive discussion of their responses will provide the foundation for the need of specific techniques to guide students' disciplinary acculturation.  We will then focus on one specific technique: the think-aloud.  The presenter will introduce the think-aloud technique, using examples drawn from everyday life, to show how interacting with and reacting to "text" occurs when one encounters information—written, visual, and spoken; participants will complete an application exercise.  She will then model this interaction with written text, using a short article.  Participants will be instructed to note the kinds of text engagement she evidences, and we will discuss these.  Then, using a second short article, participants will pair to practice the think-aloud technique.  We will conclude with an interactive discussion of how this text-engagement technique can be employed in participants' content area teaching.

Objectives of the session:

• To develop useable definitions of text and think-aloud
• To increase understanding of the expert's (instructor's) approach to content and context versus the novice's (student's) approach
• To model the think-aloud technique
• To practice the think-aloud technique
• To demonstrate application of and adaption of the think-aloud technique in the content-area classroom

Methods to involve audience:

• Survey completion and interactive discussion
• Analysis and discussion of text engagement strategies modeled by presenter
• Pair practice of think-aloud technique
• Interactive discussion of practice and of think-aloud applications in the content-based classroom