Think Aloud is a powerful tool for teachers because it gives them a look at the thinking that goes on in the brain of a learner.  It can be an especially powerful tool for modeling word attack skills.  When teachers read aloud to students they can expose their word learning strategies by stopping at words students might find hard or confusing.  They can think aloud about how to uncover the meaning of such words by rereading and noting the context clues, by looking at the root and affixes of the word, by remembering where they might have seen the word before, or even by stopping to look the word up.  These are all strategies that students need to know and be able to use to learn new words and incorporate them into their own vocabulary.