towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

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involves requests, which are not necessarily involved in the
utterance; it requires inference whose resultant label might
be 'presupposed signification';
the sentence would give us the
literal signification only. Motivational signification involves
a choice, from the addresser's part, which led him to a certain
type of utterance. This choice,for
instance, might be based on
differences of social status.
Assuming that comprehension is the product of these
three processes as a whole, we may say that our students•have
not even been able to apprehend what is explicit in the
text,
or its literal signification, not to mention what is implicit
or presupposed. If there is any misapprehension in one of
these phases related to comprehension, it is implicit that
comprehension as a whole cannot be
accomplished.
From all the lines of thought which have been
mentioned above, we might devise an illustration of the
factors
and processes which are involved in the reading of texts;
decoding would be the top of a scale which might be reached by
means of the apprehension and identification of structures and
vocabulary, together with the interpretation of the cohesive
links and ideas transmitted in the text. The students' background
and strategies would influence the apprehending and interpreting
processes which would comprise the decoding process. Any
difficulty posed by structure, for instance, would certainly
interfere with the whole process of decoding.