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Well, in order to provide the original course instructor with some fun (perhaps not) responses, you might send the students off into looking at critical discouse analysis-- a la Fairclough etc. CDA asks interesting questions about passive constructions etc. On Tue, 7 Nov 1995, Doug Brent wrote: > The other day several students came into the writing centre for help with > an assignment that, among other things, asked them to "state the apparant > meaning" of the following passage: > > > It is not, in constitutional countries, to be thought that the government, > whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to > control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself > an instrument of the general intolerance of the public. Let us suppose, > therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and > never thinks of exerting any power of coersion unless in agreement with > what it believes to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people > to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. > The power itself is illegitimate. (J. S. Mill, 1859) > > > The class was a senior interdisciplinary studies class, but naturally > some of the students were flummoxed at the basic decoding level. So were > the Writing Centre instructors, and so was I when this came to my > attention. > > After some castigating of context-free decoding assignments etc., we were > still left with the problem of how to help students with such reading > comprehension tasks. We had a lot of Inkshed-style masochistic fun > watching ourselves as we communally figured out what it meant, and > compiled a list of common-sense ideas: eliminating restrictives and then > putting them back, following equivalence chains, looking at following > sentences to see what light they cast on earlier ones, referring to prior > knowledge (what _would_ J. S. Mill likely say about this subject...?) etc. > Probably the best advice we came up with was the Hitchhiker's Guide to > the Universe advice: "Don't Panic." Probably many student never got past > the first sentence and went on to the somewhat more straightforward > sentences that followed. > > However, we want to get our hands on some theoretical background that > might help with this. Most of the reading comprehension material I am > familiar with is either aimed at lower grades or looks at global issues of > reading meaning into long passages (schema theory etc.). I am not aware > of much that addresses the fundamental problem of 20th century students > decoding the "surface meaning" (whatever that is) of relatively convoluted > 19th century, or any century, prose. > > Any ideas on a theoretical take on this problem? > > Doug Brent >