This book outlines and critiques international strategies and programmes designed to address difficulties in literacy development. The high-profile team of contributors consider teaching programmes which operate at family, school, pupil and teacher levels. They argue that school is not the only legitimate location for literacy education, and show how difficulties in literacy can be addressed sequentially, both in and out of the school context.Issues addressed include:*the dilemmas facing practitioners in choosing between multiple approaches to practice*the factors which must be addressed in strategies which operate at the level of the family and the community*how to ensure the school can support programmes designed to improve literacy learning*how to put theory into practice in programmes designed for use with individual students*the teacher as 'reflective practitioner' - developing professional practice which effectively raises literacy achievement.This book will be of interest to postgraduate students, teachers, researchers, educational professionals and policymakers who are looking for practical strategies to address difficulties in literacy development.This reader forms the basis of the Open University's Difficulties in Literacy Development course, and is ideal for similar courses nationally and internationally.

Part 1 1. Dilemmas in the Choice of Responses to Students' Difficulties in Literacy Development Part 2: Family and Community 2. Parents and Teachers 3. Collaboration Between Teachers and Parents in Assisting Children's Reading 4. Pause Prompt Praise: Reading Tutoring Procedures for Home and School Partnership 5. Dyslexia: Parents in Need 6. Rhetoric and Research in Family Literacy 7. Developing Literacy in Families with Histories of Reading Problems: Preliminary Results from a Longitudinal Study of Young Children of Dyslexic Parents 8. Partnership Approaches - New Futures for Travellers Part 3: School and Classroom 9. Using Soft Systems Methodology to Re-think Special Needs 10. Case Studies of Individual Classrooms 11. Contradictory Models: The Dilemma of Specific Learning Difficulties 12. The National Literacy Strategy and Dyslexia: A Comparison of Teaching Methods and Materials Part 4: Individual Pupil 13. Examinations Assessment and Special Arrangements 14. Learning to Understand Written Language 15. Specific Development Dyslexia (SDD) 'Basics to Back' in 2000 and Beyond? 16. Multisensory Teaching of Reading in Mainstream Settings 17. Researching the Social and Emotional Consequences of Dyslexia 18. An Examination of the Relationship Between Labelling and Stigmatisation with Special Reference to Dyslexia 19. The Long-Term Effects of Two Interventions for Children with Reading Difficulties 20. Teaching Spelling: Some Questions Answered 21. Spelling