About the Author

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.