Dr. Myra Barrs was until recently Co-Director of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). She has worked as a teacher, a publisher, an adviser, and a consultant in the UK, the USA and Canada. Myra Barrs is co-author and editor of many publications, including the Primary Language Record Handbook, The Reading Book, Whole to Part Phonics, Boys and Writing, The Reader in the Writer and Boys on the Margin. She produced the CLPE video series Learning to be Literate. Other publications include books on assessment, such as Words Not Numbers and Record-Keeping in the Primary School. She has written many articles for academic journals and professional journals on topics including assessment, children's writing, gender and literacy, and imaginative play. Her research interests include children's writing and its links with other ways of symbolising meaning. Myra Barrs was recently elected to the International Reading Association's Reading Hall of Fame. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of East London.

Margaret Moustafa is a Professor of Education at California State University at Los Angeles. She is an experienced elementary school teacher and author of Beyond Traditional Phonics: Research Discoveries and Reading Instruction (Heinemann, 1997), "Children's productive phonological recoding" (Reading Research Quarterly, 1995), and co-author of " Whole-to-parts phonics instruction: Building on what children know to help them know more" (Reading Teacher, 1999). Using the research findings of other scholars as well as her own research findings on how children learn a phonic system, she developed whole-to-parts phonics instruction as a powerful, systematic, explicit way of teaching children a phonic system which is compatible with their natural cognitive processes.