A study of the reading comprehension strategies in think-aloud protocols by lower six students of SMK Raja Chulan, Ipoh

The most important thing about reading is comprehension. Reading comprehension is the heart and soul of reading (Block, Gambrell & Pressley, 2003). Learning to read with good comprehension is a complex task. Comprehension is complicated and it requires strategies to construct meaning effectively. Because of its significance, this study is to investigate the strategies used by students to construct, to monitor and to evaluate what they are reading. Think-aloud protocol analysis is the method used in this study. The think-aloud protocol are the coded according to the procedure developed by Cote & Goldman (2004) which involved five concrete reading strategies: self-explanation, paraphrase, prediction, association and monitoring. The results indicate that better students used a wide range of strategies to construct meaning. Monitoring, a skill which is often cited as important to comprehension (Reutzel & Cooter, 2005) is evident in all the think-aloud protocols. The weaker students identified the problems but made no attempts to resolve them. These findings suggest that students will benefit from explicit reading comprehension instruction.