The objective of this research is to provide an account of literary expertise by examining literary experts and students in English Literature as they describe a fictional narrative. The experimental text is a complex narrative conveyed by means of character dialogue. / To investigate expert performance this study developed a model of text description that identified semantic units in the description protocols as a set of possible "discursive patterns." A discursive pattern identifies the text unit being described along with the point of reference of the description, that is, from the point of view of the reader, the author, or simply the text. / The results indicate that students' descriptions closely paraphrased the text, repeating either the narrative events or the characters' speech, while experts' descriptions reflected higher-level references to narrative structure or the function of the dialogue which were derived either from the text or from prior knowledge. Experts relied on specific information in the text as a support for more inferential statements. In addition, experts commented more extensively on the language of the text. Experts also included references to the author, the reader and the relationship between the two. It seems that experts view the text as the result of deliberate linguistic and conceptual choices made by an author and awareness of these choices appears to guide their descriptions.

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