ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a unified theory of literacy under the aegis of a well-established and continually-developing general theory of mind, Dual Coding Theory (DCT). It characterizes DCT as: a scientific theory, an embodied cognitive theory, a theory of decoding, comprehension, vocabulary, and response in reading, a theory of written composition and spelling and a theory of multimedia/multimodal literacy. The chapter demonstrates throughout that the mental representations and processes in DCT are basic to achieving the intersubjectivity central to the social epistemic movement in literacy. In DCT, the basic units in the verbal system are logogens, and the basic units in the nonverbal system are imagens. Three basic processes are theorized in DCT: representational processing, associative processing, and referential processing. Using the levels metaphor is only partly useful because in actual cognition processing operations are difficult to isolate. The chapter deviates briefly to elaborate on decoding, comprehension, and response in turn.
