Abstract:
Students in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Bahrain are required to study works of English Literature yet, typically, they are not equipped with the necessary reading skills to do so. Many will rely on graded readers or the kind of synopses common to published study notes. Over several semesters, students were assigned to read the first four paragraphs of Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens and asked to respond to them by answering the question “How does the text make you feel?” (in line with the approach known as Reader-Response). Significantly, being asked to respond to a text at all threw most into a panic and, as has been the case in ten years of me teaching semantics at the University and asking the same question of the same text, hardly anyone was able to provide a satisfactory answer. A Stylistic analysis of the lexical structure of the text demonstrates why its ‘meaning’ is unambiguous and why Dickens chose to say in 437 words what might be expressed in just seven. The conclusion is that an overexposure to syntagmatic features of texts denies students access to, and leaves them ignorant of, the paradigmatic structure and lexical complexity so important to appreciating Literature.
