This lesson answers the silent student question from Lesson 1:
“If meaning isn’t just in the words… where does it come from?”
The answer you are establishing:
Meaning is encoded into texts using shared cultural signs, and readers decode those signs using learned frameworks.
This lesson:
- Replaces “this suggests” with decode / encode
- Establishes meaning as learned, not guessed
- Makes accuracy possible without subjectivity wars
This session draws upon the fields of Semiotics and Structuralism. Anything capable of carrying meaning is deemed a ‘signifier’. The meaning that is being indicated is deemed the ‘signified’. When a signifier and a signified operate successfully, a ‘sign’ is formed. A scribble on the page could be considered a signifier – an object capable of carrying meaning, but without some culturally agreed signified meaning the scribble cannot function as a sign. Theorists such as Roland Barthes develop the idea that everything is a sign; everything has a form and we can interpret meaning from this form. However, we are moving toward accepted meanings though and not subjective meanings. For there to be an agreed meaning, we must also have an agreed decoding system – we must have access to the same meanings that are being encoded into a text for us to be able to decode the authorial intention. These meanings must be learned as there is no inherent / innate meaning within a sign. If meanings were innate, different languages wouldn’t have different auditory sign systems for the same nouns. A chair would be ‘chair’ in all languages. And as with foreign languages, all sign systems are foreign until they are learnt.
Literature must teach the sign systems of literature before students can decode the meanings. But this is not to be confused with Language studies – lexical or grammatical meanings are not necessarily the same as literary meanings. If this was true, there would be no need for dictionaries of symbolism and a standard dictionary would suffice.
It is important to know where meaning comes from, and literary meaning comes from an intertextuality with other earlier texts. Intertextuality is a term that will be introduced later.
This lesson could be especially complex because of the abstract nature of encoding and binary opposition. Teachers do not have to engage with all of the learning material before the ‘apply to you text’ section, and actually just the non-literary model might be the best springboard for lower year students to start accessing the encoding done within their texts. The literary examples are sophisticated and require quite a bit of learning from future lessons.
Today we are learning how texts get their meanings.
By the end of the lesson, you will understand that:
- Writers encode meaning into texts using shared signs
- Readers can decode correctly through learning, not through intuition
- Readers decode meaning using what they have learned
- Strong analysis explains how meaning is encoded and decoded
Texts don’t have meaning within them that we ‘discover’. Meaning happens when we choose to add meaning to things, and enough people must agree to use this for it to become ‘convention‘ – when enough people are decoding the same meaning, it can become a reliable sign.
Anything which can carry meaning is called a sign. Road signs and sign language are obvious examples. But secret codes, encryption, colours and shapes can carry meaning and are also signs. Very little in this world cannot be interpreted as meaning something, but the closest thing to a signifier with no attached meaning might be things scattered randomly, things screwed up without intention, or other accidental figures. We ‘read’ all sorts for meaning: clouds, rivers, geology, movements of people. Like any language, we must learn how to understand them.
- Sign – something that stands for something else
- Encode – to build meaning into a text
- Decode – to interpret meaning using knowledge
- Convention – enough people need to agree to use the encoded meaning for it to make sense
- “The writer encodes meaning through the sign of __________.”
- “Readers decode this sign as __________ because culturally it represents __________.”
- “This meaning is not personal; it is learned.”
- “We understand this term better when we are aware of what it is opposite to____”
What Students Often Think:
“Words have meanings and that’s what they mean – we can prove it through a dictionary.”
But… the thing we are referring to and the word we use are not connected physically, or every language would have the same word for the same referent. We have to learn an agreement, that we will agree to use the same word to mean something. Literature is a new set of learning that is often different to language.
🔔 Morse Code
Ask:
- Do dots and dashes naturally imply words?
- Or do we have to learn which dots and dashes mean which words?
Establish:
- Dots and dashes can be used to imply letters,
- for instance [ . . . – – . . . ] is the morse code for SOS,
- Morse code was create to hide a meaning,
- For meaning to be transmitted, both the person doing the encoding (pressing the signal button) must have the same decoding strategy as the recipient.
- The message is hidden from the enemy when the enemy doesn’t have the decoding strategy.
🚦 Traffic Lights
Meaning also requires ‘opposites’. Red means stop, but only because green is used to mean go. If there was no green light for go, how would you know when to go? If there was no green and you waited for the red light to turn off, how do you know the bulb wasn’t broken? A broken bulb would risk a collision and injury. So the sign (red light) and its opposite (green light) are integral to meaning.
❄️ Hot and cold
- At what temperature does something become cold?
- When is something hot?
- Is a hot day in England the same temperature as a hot day in Arabia?
- We learn when something is hot or cold from the people around us.
We are only able to understand things in terms of their opposites; a polar bear who has never experienced warmth can’t conceive of ‘hot’ weather and so there is no need for the word ‘cold’ to exist. A meteorite in space has no need to be aware of ‘air pressure’ because it will live entirely in a vacuum – so neither term is required in that language.
“We give meaning to things, but to understand the meaning we must all agree to it through shared learning.”
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a general kills a king in hope of replacing him and taking the king’s power. But he is racked with guilt which we see symbolically.
MACBETH Whence is that knocking?
How is ’t with me when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.LADY MACBETH
My hands are of your color, but I shame
To wear a heart so white.Knock.
I hear a knocking
At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber.
A little water clears us of this deed.
How easy is it, then! Your constancy
Hath left you unattended.
Now we can synthesis the key vocabulary from the lesson with this material text, and see if one changes what we know about the other. When one changes what we know about the other, we are said to be analysing.
Blood in Macbeth is not just physical detail. Literature encodes blood as a sign of guilt and moral corruption, which audiences are trained to decode through religious and cultural ideas about sin. The sign of blood on your hands meaning guilt might have been originally encoded in the bible – the stigmata (sign of blood on your hands) is held up by Jesus to say ‘look what they did’ or ‘I am resurrected’. Shakespeare didn’t start the encoding of this sign as meaning guilt and sin, but he borrows the meaning from earlier literary texts. Blood on the hands meaning guilt has a literary history of its own, and the audience will need to be aware of the religious encoding done upon the symbols of ‘blood on the hands’ to properly decode this scene – lack of biblical awareness will limit interpretation.
Why this is successful:
- It refers to meaning being encoded by authors,
- It recognises that important meanings are encoded by authors long before this text,
- It recognises that new authors borrow the meanings encoded by others,
- It recognises that the reader decodes by a wide awareness of literature.
Give students statements and ask them to label:
- “The writer uses darkness to show fear because scary things happen at night, so the reader thinks of danger when it’s dark.”
- “Darkness is a sign readers decode to mean danger because of how this is encoded by a long history of literary texts.”
- “This makes the reader scared because readers are often afraid of the dark.”
- Only the second uses methodological language properly
This trains diagnosis, not writing yet.
Student Task (Explicitly Methodological)
Choose one moment from our current text.
- Identify one sign (image, object, action, word).
- Explain what the writer encodes through it.
- Explain how a reader would decode it.
Provide a scaffold on the board:
The writer encodes __________ through the sign of __________.
Readers decode this as __________ because __________.
✅ Any sign is valid:
- light / dark
- silence
- isolation
- authority
- violence
- setting
Accuracy > flourish.
Students answer in one sentence:
Finish this sentence:
“Writers encode meaning using __________, and readers decode it using __________.”
You are listening for:
- signs
- cultural knowledge
- shared ideas
Why This Lesson Is Structurally Critical
- It legitimises correctness in literature
- It makes analysis learnable
- It prepares:
- authorized vs unauthorized readings
- historical sign systems
- institutional meaning
Without this, everything later sounds like opinion.
a) Pre-reading of the next lesson – read through the knowledge so you can be ready to discuss in class.
b) Apply the learning of today’s lesson to your own private reading text. Write a paragraph explaining how today’s learning changes how you might conceive your text. Be sure to use the key vocabulary and sentence stems.
c) Write a paragraph about the discipline of Literature, explain how key words from today’s lesson impact the field overall.
d) Add today’s vocabulary and sentence stems to your own glossary. Highlight any that you are unsure about, but you must also research the meanings yourself and develop your glossary to include this differentiated support.
How did you do? Remember, this is the disciplinary knowledge for Literature – it needs combining with the text you are studying now. Can you use this knowledge to write differently about the text you are studying? When you are ready, access the next lesson in this series.