The purpose of this pilot study is to examine how experts and novices in the study of literary texts read those texts, and to make suggestions for an English Language Arts (ELA) disciplinary literacy based on those findings. A small sample of experts and novices, four professors of literature and four college freshmen, participated in read-alouds of two texts. Their comments were transcribed and analyzed. This article provides a broad theory to justify the study of disciplinary literacy, as well as an explanation of the findings from this expert--novice study, especially regarding the major differences between how the experts and novices read. Specifically, three guiding traits of ELA disciplinary literacy were found and discussed: interpretive purpose-driven reading, recursive and constant hypothesizing, and literary dialoging.