Smagorinsky, P. (2001) If meaning is constructed, what is it made from? Toward a cultural theory of reading. Review of Educational Research. Vol.71 (1), 133-170.

Smagorinsky (2001) contends that any construction of meaning-is thus necessarily located first in culture and second in the mind of the individual. And because the mind extends beyond the skin to include the tools of mediation through which the individual then acts on the environment, the mind of the individual, however distributed, in turn contributes to the evolving culture of the social surround. Among these mediators are texts themselves, transactions with which can contribute to the worldviews of members of a culture… [individuals construct] meaning through two related processes. Initially, meaning emerges through the process of articulation as sense achieves expression through the medium of a psychological tool. This process produces some sort of image, a newly constructed text, that provisionally serves as the repository of meaning. This text is protean, changing with new reflection on its form. Its articulated potential thus makes it available as a tool for new transformations. I would argue when a sign becomes a tool-when an exploratory, tool-mediated process leads to a representation that in turn leads to reflection and new evocations that, when articulated, generate further evocations, with the process potentially extending indefinitely-a new concept emerges. This process of concept development is at the heart of the construction of meaning. The richest meaning, then, comes through transactions that are most generative in the production of potent new texts. "If meaning is constructed, what is it made from"? the answer lies in the transactional zone and the kinds of processes and practices that readers engage in as they employ the associations they make with the text with their broader life narrative, generating new texts that in turn make that narrative more comprehensible in terms of the cultural and ideological drama that composes their life story and locates that story in a broader social community's political life. (Similar to Bakhtin’s position on dialogue).