It should be clear that such a view of the reading process has profound consequences for understanding the status of school texts. The classroom situation, the larger social institution of public education in which it is embedded, and, as well, the even larger social institutions that determine what counts as knowledge (e.g., academic disciplines), all influence in various ways for various readers how a string of signifiers may be structured into an utterance. A story presented to a class in a text anthology of short fiction will, at least for some readers, be radically different than the "same" story in a book handed across the aisle in a bus.