  Significant challenges exist globally regarding literacy teaching and
learning. To address these challenges, key features of how the brain works
should be taken into account. First, perception is an active process based in
detection of errors in hierarchical predictions of sensory data and action
outcomes. Reading is a particular case of this non-linear predictive process.
Second, emotions play a key role in underlying cognitive functioning, including
oral and written language. Negative emotions undermine motivation to learn.
Third, there is not the fundamental difference between listening/speaking and
reading/writing often alleged on the basis of evolutionary arguments. Both are
socio-cultural practices that are driven through the communication imperative
of the social brain. Fourth, both listening and reading are contextually
occurring pyscho-social practices of understanding, shaped by current knowledge
and cutlural contexts and practices. Fifth, the natural operation of the brain
is not rule-based, as is supposed in the standard view of linguistics: it is
prediction, based on statistical pattern recognition. This all calls into
question narrow interpretations of the widely quoted "Simple View of Reading",
which argues that explict decoding is the necessary route to comprehension. One
of the two neural routes to reading does not involve such explicit decoding
processes, and can be activated from the earliest years. An integrated view of
brain function reflecting the non-linear contextual nature of the reading
process implies that an ongoing focus on personal meaning and understanding
from the very beginning provides positive conditions for learning all aspects
of reading and writing.
