Socialized Literacy Structure (I need to rewrite)

 If one were to approach literacy, not just in the facet of reading, but in its full capacity for understanding, it becomes clear that true literacy combines reading, writing, and speaking.  Similar to Freud's construction of the self and Moffet's concept of scaffolding to educate the individual, this triad helps create continuance for a more specialized self, encouraging constant reflection and development.  It is, rather, more structurally linked to C.S. Peirce's triadic theory of language, later attributed to Sassure for his linguistic model.

For Freud and Moffet, the self and the idea move from the chronological (listed) to the analogical (more sophisticated) and interconnect, creating a continuance and timelessness of thought progression. For the individual, this means that one becomes more specialized in areas of thought that are paid more attention to, resulting in more effective communicaton as the triadic structure builds upon itself.

For this reason,  sophistication becomes essential in order to effectvely communicate with an audience (both direct and implied).  Although the level of speech pattern exists, this also rings true for the comprehension of outside reading (in symbolic as well as concrete structures and "naming" the world) and crucial as we make our mark upon it.  Here, the early writer wants begins at the, "id," wanting to satisfy the, “me, me, me, now, now, now” of creation rather than develop a final product of a piece. 

Socialization and audience thus becomes necessary to develop the necessary implied social cues as ego comes into place.  As writing becomes more social and formalized, it takes on the strata of the alter ego. The further one progresses, the more specialized the writing must become in order to appropriately communicate with the audience, relative both to the purpose and to the work. Moffett himself argued that, "the early egocentric speech of the child becomes gradually ‘socialized’ and adapts itself to other people."  This ideology, much like those held by Piaget and Vygotsky moves, "from a private world of egocentric chatter to a public universe of discourse."  This discourse allows for the specialized communication within a language and symbol-structure to fully communicate for effective understanding.

Wiggins and McTighe also argue that our understanding is not linear, but made up of six faeets.  Through their research, much of which aligns with Gardner's sensory learning tableau and Piaget's developmental phases, we instead can attach the term "writer" to children because of their sound-play and adhering of words to the physical and psychical world.  In Moffett’s words, “we ask the student to tell what happened in four different rhetorics –to himself as he spontaneously recalls a memory, to a friend face to face, to someone he knows… and to the world at large” (27). A student will learn to scaffold a skills-based literacy in order to bring Bruner’s symbolic phase to a realization significant to their emotional development initially laid out by Freud's conception of the "self,"  thus bringing the argument full circle.

Later in his study, Moffet continues to analyze the cognitive phases of Bruner (inactive, iconic, and symbolic) as the child manipulates and interprets space with what he calls, "image summaries" that later help to carry out logical operations as well as said physical manipulations.  Bruner's ideology connects also to the triadic literacy structure, almost as sub-triads for each facet; the inactive voice is thought/iconic words/ symbolic as representamum; for reading the inactive aligns with decoding, the iconic is the basic understanding,and the symbolic how it adheres to the outer world; for writing, the inactive is the physicality that goes into the written word, the iconic is the combination of convention and organization, and the idea and voice conveyed symbolically through metynomical means.

Though Moffett focuses his research on writing, the concept of an individual beginning the process of cognition internally and gradually formalizing that understanding is easily translated to various skills-based curricula.
As students move towards a more formalized education, representative of the transitional markings , their ego matures, and they are able to learn social mores and an “egocentric” understanding of literacy.  The child formalizes vocalizations that allow them to become more effective communicators, thus with an even more formalized thought momentum that equivocates publication, being that there is now an implied (if not actual) audience in mind.  Their  finished written product demonstrates mastery and growth of a given strategy for reading, writing, and or speaking.The combination of reading, writing and speech helps provide the emotional mandate  needed to, "play on the symbolic scale," allowing students to not only discover voice, but to discover their own voice and effectively express it on the written and therefore material platform.


***

Moffett, James. “I, You, and It” College Composition and Communication 16. 1965. 243-48.