Despite considerable research on teaching and learning in higher education, the relationship between university teachers' and students' understandings of the same teaching-learning events has not been a focus. This exploratory qualitative study used individual interviews to investigate the role of conceptions of teaching, learning and knowledge in a lecturer's and three first-year students' understandings of a lecture on "Hamlet" and to compare the meaning intended by the lecturer with that perceived by his students. A video-taped lecture was used as a focus for discussion in interviews and individual case studies were developed. Case studies were compared to explore whether lecturer and student conceptions could explain their relative lecture descriptions. The concept of "communicative alignment" was adopted to describe this teaching-learning relationship. (Contains 2 tables.)