ABSTRACT
We discussed in Chapter 4 the importance of children’s awareness of their own understanding as they read and suggested that an effective teaching strategy to encourage this awareness is for teachers actively to demonstrate to children their own thinking/monitoring processes as they try to understand a text. Similarly in Chapters 5 and 7 we gave practical examples of teachers engaging in metacognitive discussion as they modelled various stages in the process of research. It has been demonstrated that the systematic use of such ‘think alouds’ can have significant effects upon children’s abilities to understand what they read (Palincsar and Brown, 1984). By ‘think alouds’ we mean teachers making explicit, by offering a commentary as they read, what it is they do when they understand or fail to understand something.
