ABSTRACT
Think-aloud protocols would appear to be a perfect source of information concerning the relationship between academic literacy and the nature of expertise: They seem to tell us how participants actually go about completing their work—their rhetorical processes—as well as how they go about representing their ideas—the domain content. Yet any researcher who wants to take advantage of these apparent strengths must seriously consider the arguments that have been made both about the ecological validity of protocol data and about their theoretical status. Indeed, the use of think-aloud protocols has been regularly criticized both in cognitive psychology where it originated (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977) and in writing research where it has never become a mainstream method (see Appendix A).
