This work reflects a wide range of issues regarding children's literacy problems, mainly at the primary school level. The purposes of the book are twofold: in part 1, to identify some challenges in the field of literacy, and, in part 2, to give an account of various responses to these challenges. Some of the authors are principally interested in how young children normally learn to read and spell, and also in how later reading and spelling difficulties can be prevented or reduced. Other contributors have devoted themselves to helping alleviate the problems of the many pupils in mainstream schools who have been identified as having difficulties in learning to read, spell and write. A sub-set of authors consider the rarer phenomena of children who have proved unusually resistant to good mainstream teaching methods and who have specific learning difficulties (literacy), or specific developmental dyslexia.