Four Fourth Graders Thinking Aloud: An Investigation of Genre Effects

Abstract

This study investigated 4 developing readers' processing of text by asking them to think aloud as they read 5 narratives and 5 expository texts over the course of a school year. Five general categories of processing were identified: paraphrasing, questioning, elaborating, hypothesizing, and monitoring. The reading of narratives was compared to the reading of expository texts. While reading narratives, students hypothesized a greater percentage of the time, and while reading expository texts, they elaborated a greater percentage of the time. When reading narratives, students made more inferences, predictions, and interpretations, which seemed to be based on a developing synthesis and integration of incoming text information. When reading expository texts, students focused more on personal knowledge and experiences, providing commentary about or creating comparisons in response to details and more local text information. Students were also asked to provide a summary. Student summaries differed by genre, with narrative summaries including a greater percentage of important ideas than the summaries of expository texts which, like the students' on-line processing, focused more on local text information.