“Generic” and “Specific” Expertise in English: An Expert/Expert Study in Poetry Interpretation and Academic Argument

Abstract

In this study, eight English professors thought aloud as they read four lyric poems and composed a short text proposing a hypothetical talk about them for a professional conference. The study used a crossed design in which participants read a poem in each of the following conditions: familiar to them and close to their professional writing, familiar and far, unfamiliar and close, unfamiliar and far. When reading familiar poems, participants produced longer protocols and more elaborate interpretations. When planning their conference talks, participants produced longer protocols for poems that were far from their professional writing as they struggled to access sufficient background knowledge. Participants attempted to say something "new" about the poems, and they closely monitored the limits of their knowledge. These results suggest that English professors, just like experts in other disciplines, develop both "generic" and "specific" expertise. Implications for expertise research, literature instruction, and academic literary scholars are considered.

“Getting the Point” of Literature: Relations Between Processing and Interpretation

“…Second, descriptions of what constitutes expert "behavior" in reading literary works were drawn from patterns in prior research rather than from direct comparison between a sample of experts reading the two stories that were used in the current studies. It would be very useful to collect more contemporary data from experts on a wider sample of literary works to augment the existing studies of literary experts (for a study of experts in poetry see Warren, 2011). Third, the prompted interview task did not pursue justifications for the interpretations that participants provided by, for example, asking participants to say what in the text supported their interpretive claims.…”

“…In summary, little is known about how readers other than literary experts engage in interpretive processing of literary texts (e.g., Graves & Frederiksen, 1991;Warren, 2011;Zeitz, 1994). Prior research suggests that novice literary readers generally provide little evidence of interpretive processing (Graves & Frederiksen, 1991;Zeitz, 1994), except under certain task demands .…”

Epistemic Processing When Adolescents Read Online: A Verbal Protocol Analysis of More and Less Successful Online Readers

“…Although the effect of topic‐related prior knowledge appeared to be minimal in this study, it was not surprising to observe many noncritical behaviors and thoughts among the study's adolescent participants; for example, the many instances of outright acceptance or rejection of sources without informed predictions or critical content analysis to discern (un)reliable websites. Research on domain expertise and beliefs has suggested several explanations for weaker practices in deliberate thinking (Maggioni et al., ; Muis, ; Murphy, Edwards, Buehl, & Zeruth, ; Warren, ). Possible explanations include lack of knowledge in relevant domains (e.g., environmental science, legal regulation), a shortage of experience in disciplinary practices (e.g., scientific argumentation, document‐based reasoning), or uninformed perspectives related to a particular problem (e.g., Who is involved in discourses of MTR coal mining?…”

Individual differences in literary reading: Dimensions or categories

“…Graves (1996) discussed the issues of expertise operationalization, i.e., whether we should focus on generic or domain-specific expertise (cf. Warren, 2011), and which tasks are suitable to study expertise effects on literary reading, noting that options at each of these steps may affect study outcome. Moreover, we would argue that studying expertise is not a suitable replacement for studying differences between readers in general.…”