Literacy: Constructing Meaning through Philosophical Inquiry

Recently, the perspective on literacy was changed from the view of considering literacy as basic skills of simple correspondence between sound and letter to the view of considering literacy as high level skills which consider the presenter’s intention and purpose, and the receptor’s background and need in a synthetic communicative context. Literacy is not the translating activity of letters to phonemes, phonemes to letters. Rather, literacy is considered to be very complicated, and a higher mental process in which writers construct meaning and readers reconstruct meaning (Rumelhart, 1981). Literacy also consists of the conventional reading and writing of skillful readers or writers, and the basic skills of oral language.Alongside the changes on the emphasis in literacy, literacy education has also changed from emphasizing decoding letters and teaching words to emphasizing active interpretation and theconstruction of the meaning of text.In early childhood education, literacy education began to emphasize both the child’s active reading and the transaction between the child and fairy tales (Rosenblatt, 1989). To emphasize meaning construction, a more natural literature-based content is being used. Recently, literacy activities in young childhood education curriculum emphasize meaning construction using drawing, reading big books, discussing, writing, and remaking stories.Lipman thought that the meanings were connections and relationships (Lipman, 1991). Vygotsky considered word meaning as the basic unit for meaning construction, and considered meaning construction as making relations between word meanings. According to Dewey, meaningis dependent on perceived connecting context, and meaning construction is the making of connections and relations by interweaving thoughts, words, and actions. Thus, meaning is constructed by searching for or creating various kinds of relationships. Therefore to improve a child’s meaning construction, it is necessary for children to make several kinds of relationships: of word to another word; of word to thing; of thing to another thing. These processes depend on the child’s abilities to connect new words, information, and ideas to the child’s prior knowledge. There are several effective teaching methods for meaning construction: the experience of reading books stimulated with skillful adult’s scaffolding dialogue (Stephanie, 1995), the cooperative activity between adults and children in reading books, listening, and discussing with divergent dialogue (Cochran-Smith, 1984), and the cultivating of children’s thinking and imaginat