chapotraphouse

Dickens feels like an odd choice to display functional illiteracy, given that while it's technically written in modern English it's also marred with the cultural baggage of Victorian England; "wonderful," for example, is meant in this passage to mean that it produces awe or astonishment, but that's not how the word is used by anyone in modern times. The dinosaur portion is part of a larger metaphor using Noah's Ark which is only really going to pop to someone with decent familiarity with Christian mythology, and worded in a way that still takes someone literate a moment to digest and understand it.

I'm not entirely sure the form of the study helps either; most of the responses seem like they threw a passage at an undergrad and immediately demanded their interpretation in a clinical (read: atypical and somewhat uncomfortable compared to normal reading) setting. How many of the readers would have re-parsed the passage given another moment or two and understood it? Furthermore, the opening passage isn't even particularly important to the plot, and it seems like the vast majority of people reading understood at the very least that "it was a shitty morning in London" is the point here. Is that functional illiteracy, or simply skimming purple prose that isn't all the relevant to the story?

This example feels only a little removed from laughing at undergrads for not understanding why Homer spent so goddamn long in the Iliad charting random Greek soldiers' entire family trees only to kill them off a breath afterwards, and calling them illiterate for not grasping cultural context from literal antiquity.