When Reading, Spelling, Sentence Writing and Fluency are Taught as a Single Ability
We’d like to show you an exciting new approach to literacy that makes sense to teachers and students. Called integrated language-literacy learning, students learn to read, spell and write as if these are a single ability -- not isolated skills. The four major components of spoken language, phonemic sounds, and the meaningful parts of speech, morphemes, words and sentences, are also integrated from the start. When learned simultaneously, literacy skills and speech abilities strongly reinforce each other, becoming a deeply interconnected, useful and meaningful system. Critically, written language becomes as easy to understand as spoken language.
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The power of integrated language-literacy learning is evident in students who are proficient in all three abilities. For these students, it’s hard to divide reading from spelling and writing. They easily transform letters into meaningful spelling patterns, including words with multiple syllables and morphemes. Their spelling abilities directly strengthen decoding, fluency and comprehension which, in turn, make sentence writing easier. Decoding becomes effortless, spelling meaningful and sentence writing enjoyable. Isn’t it only fair that we develop this level of language and literacy in all students?
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To accomplish this goal, we developed Sparking the Reading Shift for our seven-to-seventeen-year-old special ed, underperforming and reading adverse students. By the end of the first lesson students are reading and spelling words with multiple syllables and morphemes in complex sentences. Students accustomed to working on isolated skills quickly realize their greater literacy capabilities, which is highly motivating for both the student and teacher.
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Integrated language-literacy learning also saves hours of instructional time each week as decoding, spelling, fluency, writing and vocabulary instruction are all rolled into a single lesson. Far fewer lessons are needed to build a firm foundation for literacy, so students soon graduate from small group to whole class instruction. The Sparking the Reading Shift intervention is 16 lessons long while the enrichment version contains 12 shorter lessons.
The Language That Empowers Literacy
Integrated learning gives equal weight to reading, spelling and sentence writing as well as to five components of language:
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Phonemes and graphemes – Phonemes, the sounds of spoken language, and graphemes, the letters that represent phonemes in writing, both become morphemes. When you look at graphemes or listen to phonemes, they both instantly dissolve into meaningful morphemes and words. Developing strong connections between phonemes, graphemes and morphemes is the key to accurate and meaningful word reading.
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Morphemes, the meaningful core of words, influence spelling, decoding, vocabulary and sight word growth. Every word in every language is either a morpheme by itself or is composed of one or more morphemes. These core elements are called base morphemes. In English, graphemes consistently code for morphemes. Notice how the spelling for the morpheme sign forms the base in the following words even as the pronunciation of the s, i and g varies: sign, signal, resign, designate, assignment. Understanding the tight relationship between graphemes and morphemes turns English's spelling system into a reliable meaning-based system, making it possible for even emergent readers to read and write multisyllable words.
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Words, the semantic layer of language, all contain a morpheme yet have richer meanings, which is essential to language and literacy development. Easily decoded words like run, are often powerful bases. Run is the base in running, runnable and overrun, and has over 40 noun, 20 verb, and 12 adjective definitions. It is used in dozens of phrases with meanings as diverse as having the runs, running your mouth, run out of toilet paper and a runny nose – all of which a three-year-old understands.
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Phrases are combinations of words that don’t contain both a verb and a noun. Phrases are an often neglected stepping stone between words and sentences which heavily influence fluency and comprehension. Phrases, too, shift the meaning of words. Light becomes a noun in the phrase “filled with light," a verb in “light the candles," and an adjective in "the light jacket."
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Sentences, the syntactic level of language, are the primary reason that we learn to read and spell. Sentences are where morphemes, words and phrases all come together to create meaning. Sentences:
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are critical from the outset of reading development
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determine the progress that children make over time in learning to read
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largely predict and determine text level fluency and comprehension
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For a ready-to-use sample lesson with activities used in both Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Enrichment and Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Intervention click here.
Sparking the Fluency Shift
The Language-Literacy Learning Only Requires Three Methods
Sparking the Reading Shift exploits another benefit of integrated language-literacy learning – students only need to learn three ways to play with words, phrases and sentences:
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Build Words from phonemes, graphemes and morphemes, and then use them as building blocks for longer words, phrases and sentences. In each lesson, students practice turning a base morpheme like spect into longer words like inspect, spectacle, spectacular and respected, which also builds spelling and vocabulary abilities. Finally, they build complex sentences from noun, verb and prepositional phases.
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Break Down practice starts at the top with sentences, which are split into phrases and then words. Poly-morphemic words are divided into single morphemes, while single syllable words into broken down into phonemes and graphemes.
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Manipulation skills show students how multiple components of language and literacy work together. Students practice substituting phonemes, graphemes and morphemes to make new words. They switch the /a/ in slap to an /i/ to make slip, then the /s/ to an /f/ to make flip. They then practice shifting affixes to turn act into actor, action, react, actual and enacting. Paraphrasing, switching phrases in sentences, is equally as interesting.
Together, building, breaking down and manipulating activities turn words into enjoyable linguistic Lego blocks.
Sparking the Fluency Shift
To continually grow as readers, students need to be exposed to challenging words and complex sentences in increasingly difficult text. This is how our most proficient students continually grow as readers. Researchers including Timothy Shanahan, Matthew Burns and Elfrieda Hiebert have shown that readers, including struggling readers, make the most growth when they read text at or above their grade-level. For delayed readers this means text at a frustrational level. Reading at this high level is achievable using a special type of repeated reading called rehearsal practice.​
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Simply, students rehearse the more challenging words and sentences as pre-reading practice using activities that increase accuracy, fluency and comprehension. Extra attention is given to unfamiliar and multisyllabic words, as well as to complex sentences containing multiple phrases. This approach is especially important for seven-year-old and older students, as even third grade text contains between three and seven unfamiliar words per hundred, the majority containing multiple syllables. Research shows that this approach significantly improves fluency, provides at least a grade-level improvement in comprehension and expands vocabulary knowledge. Rehearsal practice with challenging text also solidifies basic word reading, limiting the need for isolated skill instruction.
To offer our students these advantages, we created Sparking the Fluency Shift, a collection of 36 short stories that provide increasingly challenging words and sentence structures. The stories range from beginning first grade to a solid sixth grade level, providing a path to above grade-level reading, a level typically achieved by fluent readers. Each story is slightly more difficult than the previous story. Students typically move up a level every week which provides constant positive feedback to students and reassurance to teachers.
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Each story is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice drawn from 12 activities that develop fluent, meaningful and enjoyable reading experiences. The 150-to-400 stories were chosen by eight-to-twelve-year-old students based on their interests. The topics range from making friends and dealing with conflicts, to fantasy stories about time travel. After rehearsal practice students often read the stories with little assistance or interruptions. Reading becomes an easy, engaging & enriching activity – not just an academic task. ​
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For a free, three-story sample from Sparking the Fluency Shift complete with rehearsal practice activities at the 1st, 3rd and 5th grade levels, click here
Sparking the Reading Shift
​Sparking the Reading Shift comes in two versions:
Language-literacy Intervention ($28) contains 170 page, 16 one-hour lessons. Each page is a ready-to-use word activity, with brief instruction and word lists. This version is for students who have required extensive instruction from special education, classroom or reading teachers. A thirty-minute lesson once or twice a week is enough to quickly produce noticeable growth. This is a consumable workbook, as students are continually reading, spelling words and writing phrases and sentences in the book.
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Language-literacy Enrichment ($18) contains 120 page,12 forty-five-minute lessons in a consumable workbook format. This version uses the same activities as in Language-literacy Intervention but with an accelerated format. For disfluent, disinterested & underperforming readers, including students reading at grade-level.
If you are unsure of which version to use, then start with Language-literacy Enrichment. Email me with questions. Bruce@ReadingShift.com
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See a sample lesson below or download the a ready-to-use lesson here
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Sparking the Fluency Shift
Sparking the Fluency Shift ($20) also requires no training or experience. Parents successfully use the stories with their disfluent children. Teachers often take Fluency Shift home to help their own children.
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While Sparking the Fluency Shift directly supports Sparking the Reading Shift the book is widely used with all underperforming readers.
For a PDF with three sample stories and rehearsal practice activities click here
Both Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift are available in PDF format for immediate download or in print, by mail (scroll right below).
Consider your printing costs for the120-to-170-page books when choosing between the PDF and print version. US Priority Mail is only about $8.
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Meet The Author
I’m Bruce Howlett, a former biology researcher and should-be-retired special education teacher who struggled with literacy until the age of 44. I then started creating reading lessons with a speech therapist for our mutual students, initially focusing on phonemic awareness. I soon noticed improvement in reading fluency and spelling, as well as listening comprehension. This sparked my continuing interest in the relationship between literacy and language.
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However, reading, spelling and writing still presented challenges. So, for the last twenty-five years I have continued to study emerging research, looking for more satisfying methods for my special education students, and, increasingly, for underperforming and disinterested readers – as well as for myself.
During the pandemic I did what researchers often do when confronted with partial solutions – I threw out all my existing lessons and started over by working backwards from the latest research. This led me to dozens of educators and researchers who are equally as passionate about providing students with enhanced language-based literacy instruction. The result is Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift.
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A Linguistic Lego Lesson
This is a lesson from Sparking the Reading Shift that uses activities from the first three lessons in both versions.
The activities are designed to actively engage readers in linguistically challenging practice that takes them from sounds to sentence reading and writing in each lesson. The lessons follow an A - Analyze B - Build E - Expand and C - Combine format. While this is a different approach, ask yourself if these are the types of words and sentences that you want your students reading, spelling and writing.​
