This chapter deals with global literacy development in relation to writing systems. A global perspective on literacy compels attention to global variation in languages and writing systems. The history of writing involves processes of discovery, borrowing, and modification, which language communities go through when they move toward a literate society. These processes require choices to be made regarding the graphic forms and how they connect to the spoken language and to broader cultural and educational considerations, including how new generations can learn this writing to understand their language. Across the globe, writing systems have developed varying solutions as to how to represent their spoken language, that is, its phonological, morphological, and semantic properties. In this chapter, some of the solutions to this mapping problem through invention and variation will be examined , and cognitive principles aiding the process of learning to read across languages and writing systems are proposed. The chapter concludes that writing systems follow the same set of operating principles in learning to read but that the they differences between them do matter for in terms of understanding the weighting of reading procedures and different educational challenges. It is also emphasized that all writing systems are learnable, and instruction effectively geared toward their specific properties may be successful for most children.

In this introductory chapter, we examine the worldwide distribution of literacy, its development with schooling, and the sources of individual variation in literacy outcomes. Various perspectives on global variation are discussed while also aiming for a common framework to describe literacy development that recognizes demographic boundaries in the world, on the one hand, and its global variation as a function of bio-ecological markers on the other hand. In this introduction, we draw attention to the wealth of recent research on variations in literacy development that arise across regions and that reflect the multiple interrelated influences of individual, home, school, and societal factors. Furthermore, observations on the neurobiological and ecological markers related to global literacy are discussed. These include the role of writing systems, genetics, brain foundations, self-regulation, and sociocultural, contextual, teacher, and parental factors in global literacy development. An explanatory framework is also provided showing that literacy development involves gaining reading fluency and spelling to facilitate reading comprehension and writing, that it builds on language, and that child characteristics and home- and school-support factors combine to influence individual variation, within an indirectly influential sociopolitical context.

In this final chapter, a wide-angle perspective is provided on the major issues that arise when one thinks globally about literacy. Despite many important differences across the globe, literacy development suggests some general patterns that reflect nearly universal phases and shared operating principles. Although the “development” of literacy begins early through natural processes of language development and conceptual development, it is school experiences, explicitly designed to teach reading, that we expect to ensure the achievement of literacy. Each classroom within a school is its own literacy ecosystem, with one or more teachers, students, literacy curriculum materials, assesments, and regulated interactions. The classroom itself is embedded within other systems – the school, the community, the larger school administrative units, and local, regional, and national government control agents. A Global Literacy Framework is presented, showing that literacy development is embedded in language development and can be predicted by (a) system factors, referring to variations in the linguistic and writing systems, (b) child factors, associated with the neurobiological foundation of children’s learning capacity, and (c) support factors, associated with processes in the home and at school. All these influences exist within a sociopolitical context that exerts influence broadly across the system.

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by unexpectedly low reading ability in people who have adequate nonverbal intelligence, have acquired typical schooling, and have experienced sufficient sociocultural opportunities (Gabrieli, 2009; Peterson & Pennington, 2012). It is a recognized disorder in many literate societies and has been studied in a large variety of languages (Caravolas, 2005). The Chinese writing system presents sharp contrast to the alphabetic writing system in terms of how the graphic unit maps onto phonology and semantics. Thus, the investigations into the mechanisms for Chinese reading disability are important to the understanding of the universal and language-specific mechanisms of developmental dyslexia. The behavioral and neural correlates of Chinese developmental dyslexia have been studied extensively in the past twenty years or so, providing us with a rich understanding of Chinese developmental dyslexia.

In this final chapter, we provide our view on some of the main conclusions that can be drawn from the research on developmental dyslexia across languages. The overarching questions concern how our understanding of reading disability benefits from considering a broad array of languages. If there is a universal biological basis of developmental dyslexia, there should be shared observations on reading disability across languages and writing systems. Or, so one might expect. It is possible, however, that observations of differences in the manifestations of dyslexia – whether subtyping within a language (e.g., phonological vs surface dyslexia) or comparisons across languages (e.g., alphabetic vs morphosyllabic) – reflect some unitary cause or combinations of multiple causes.