A study investigated the differences between what advanced and remedial high school readers do while reading a short story. Subjects were three seniors nominated by their literature teachers as being expert high school readers of literature, and three junior level students who were all reading about two grade levels below the junior level according to recent achievement test scores. Subjects were instructed to read the story, doing their best to read it as completely as possible, and saying out loud everything they did in coming to an understanding of the story. The remedial students were given a practice short story in order to become comfortable with speaking their thoughts out loud. A follow-up interview asked the students to tell what the story was about. Results indicated that the advanced readers seemed to understand that reading the story for understanding required building a mental representation of the story that made sense, and that the target operations above were used in the process of building that representation. It is possible that the advanced readers considered themselves knowledgeable enough about literature to make judgments about the worth of a work as literature and that the poor readers did not. (Two tables of data, 15 references, and 3 appendixes of text and data are attached.) (RAE)