Drawing on writings by recent post-modernist thinkers and semioticians, this paper focuses on a combination of hermeneutic and semiotic viewpoints and applies them to defining the nature of interpretation in an educational setting (e.g., text interpretation), the interpreter, and the essence of the act of comprehension and interpretation. The main examples discussed come from English as a foreign language and blend aspects of Dewey's educational thinking with the hermeneutic approach. (Contains 15 references.) (CNP)