Learning to Read - Softcover

Masha Bell experienced firsthand that learning to read and write English is exceptionally difficult. She first began to learn the language at the age of 14, after Lithuanian and Russian, and before going on to learn German, French and Spanish. She found literacy acquisition in English much harder than in all the others. She graduated in Philosophy and Psychology at Exeter University in 1970 and then went on to become a secondary school teacher of English and modern languages in Dorset. She has also raised two children. She has tried to present and explain the difficulties of learning to read and English in her book Understanding English Spelling and her website www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk. LEARNING TO READ tries to provide practical help with literacy acquisition for learners, their parents and teachers. After retiring from teaching she spent some time working as a voluntary reading assistant with primary children. She found that their main difficulty was decoding words which contain some phonically tricky letters, such as beautiful, people, could . But she noticed that they also still had serious gaps in their grasp of basic phonics. She started work on Learning to Read with the aim of providing an easy-to-use means of plugging the gaps in the phonic knowledge of such children. She has since come to realise that many other children, as well as teachers and parents, are likely to benefit from having access to a book that sets out the whole basic English spelling system in a single, learner-friendly slim volume.

Masha Bell believes that education bestows great advantages and that an educated population is an essential ingredient of a healthy modern society and democracy. She is therefore passionately interested in enabling as many people as possible to read and write effectively. Since having to stop teaching English and modern languages on health grounds in 1994, she has devoted nearly all her time and energy to understanding why so relatively many English-speaking children have literacy problems and how they can be helped to overcome them. Her comparatively late introduction to English at the age of 14 has made her exceptionally aware of its learning problems.