Improving the quality of literacyteaching may require intervening at different levels, forexample, encouraging school attendance and optimizingtextbook format and teaching methods. Reading is a complextask involving perceptual, motor, linguistic, phonological,and memory components, each of which has a crucial role indetermining reading rate. High poverty rates continue tohave a negative impact on human resource development andeducation quality in Africa, further complicating theability of most countries to reach the Education for All(EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Moreover,Africa and Asia are hosts to most of the world'smultilingual countries, in which textbook availability inmajor indigenous languages is sorely lacking. Therefore, itis important to take all possible steps to maximize theeffectiveness of teaching interventions. In parallel, alsothe quality of textbooks is a crucial factor for qualityeducation, especially in developing countries. It isimportant to dispose of well-written and well-designedtextbooks, because the quality of textbook can be animportant predictor of student learning and can contributeto the effective use of instructional time and classroomteaching. This review examines the evidence regardingvariables influencing acquisition of decoding andcomprehension reading skills. One important caveat is inorder. While the educational, psychological and neuroscienceliterature on reading is extensive, it largely depends uponstudies on English speaking individuals. The first part ofthe review focuses on studies of visual psychophysics andexamines the visual limitations affecting reading and itsdevelopment. The second part of the review draws on thepsychological and neuroscience literature to examine therole of several variables influencing reading acquisition,such as letter knowledge, teaching method, teacher'scompetence, orthographic consistency.
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