This research presents a psychological investigation of the characteristics of literary reading and the expertise associated with it. Specifically, it examines the kinds of knowledge about discourse which highly skilled readers use to generate a representation of a fictional narrative. At the same time it investigates their informal reasoning and the role that authorial intentions play in their interpretive strategies. / To investigate highly skilled literary readers who are trained to look at texts in multi-dimensional ways, this research applied a cognitive model of literary reading to analyze the readers' verbal protocols in terms of discursive patterns and reasoning strategies. / The findings suggest that as student readers gain knowledge and experience, their developing expertise is demonstrated by their ability to generate knowledge representations of the multiple components of a literary text. The construction of an explicit communicative context, however, is a hallmark of literary expertise and is instrumental in their reasoning since it frames the problem space for their text descriptions. Students, in contrast, appear ambivalent about the author-text relationship.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.40131 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Graves, Barbara |
| Contributors | Frederiksen, C. H. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001484917, proquestno: NN12377, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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