**1. Introduction**

'Learning to read requires mastering the system by which print encodes the language.' [1]

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I am an educational psychologist who specialises in work with children with learning and reading difficulties. As part of this work, I have been developing a reading fluency programme based on a series of ebooks.

The text of the ebooks has been written based on neurolinguistic theory1 , and the ebooks are designed to be used with a form of oral impress procedure based on paired reading. This is simple to implement. It differs from the type of paired reading procedures documented in the literature, as it involves additional repetition to develop phonic associations and automaticity in reading.

The ebooks are set in large print with wide spaces between words to provide maximal visual cues and also to prevent crowding, which has emerged in recent literature as a factor affecting reading in dyslexic children. The oral impress procedure also builds in visual tracking to maintain visual attention. Repetition on both the phonological and the visual level is thus provided both in the text of the ebooks as well as in the procedures used to work with the children. Visual attention is maintained through the use of a pointer working from the top of the line, and not from the bottom, for the reason that the top of the line provides greater visual cues than the bottom of the line.

As the materials are in electronic form, they provide a form of e-learning which can be used in contact, as well as at distance. The ebooks are designed to be used by parents and can also be used by therapists, teachers and schools to develop fluent reading. Assessment and evaluation are built into the programme's structure, linked to an awards system for children using the materials.

This chapter is written in three parts. The first part of the chapter presents a literature review. The second part describes the development of the characters and setting of a set of reading materials called 'The Doctor Skunk Stories', which were developed for a child who lived some 6,000 miles away from my rooms. This part of the chapter is based on a longitudinal case study. The third part of the chapter then describes the subsequent development of the materials into an assessment-based reading programme and presents results of the first cohort of children who have worked on this programme with their parents.

At this stage in the development of the programme, there is plenty of material available, and the ebooks and supporting methodology are currently being used by the parents, therapists and teachers of over seventy children with reading difficulty across our country. Some of the children live over a thousand kilometres from my rooms. Others are in schools or clinics. The results have been promising with younger children as well as adolescents. Parents, therapists, teachers and children have also provided positive evaluations of the benefits improved reading fluency has had on reading ability more generally, as well as on school work.

<sup>1</sup> The approach to automaticity in reading adopted in this chapter is based on the work of the Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, and the term "neurolinguistic" follows Luria's work on the physiological basis of language-based functions (Luria, A.R. (1976). Basic Problems of Neurolinguistics. The Hague: Mouton B.V.) as well as the approach suggested by Arbib and Caplan of the Center for Systems Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Arbib, M.A. and Caplan, D . (1979). Neurolinguistics must be computational. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2, 3, pages 449- 460) in which neurolinguistics draws insights from modern neuroanatomy, neurochemistry and neurophysiology.
