Sparking the Reading Shift

There are Two Steps to Equable Literacy Growth:

Invert Your Literacy Instruction - Start with Sentences
Treat Reading, Spelling and Writing as a Single Ability

Are your delayed, dyslexic or simply disinterested readers and writers not making as much progress as you’d like? Is their spelling confusing, reading effortful and are their sentences disorganized? Are your students or children disengaged during literacy instruction, failing to develop a fascination with words or a love of reading?

Then it’s time for a simple change. Invert your literacy instruction. Begin lessons by exploring sentences, where words find their meaning, fluency comes to life and reading becomes enjoyable—not just an academic task.

Sentences are fundamental to communication and comprehension in all languages. Developing proficiency with sentences builds the foundational language abilities that support a broad range of literacy abilities. For example, sentence-level comprehension strongly predicts and largely determines text-level comprehension.

As the graphic shows, complex sentences are easily broken down into phrases, revealing their deeper meaning. Phrases are composed of words, all of which contain a meaningful core called a morpheme. These are spelled in consistent ways with graphemes, the spelling patterns that represent phonemes in morphemes. We'll explore this more, shortly.

A sentence-first approach also helps students experience early success with spelling and writing, limiting the anxious or avoidance behaviors that delayed readers often exhibit when confronted with these cognitively demanding abilities. I'll show you simple sentence writing activities that ensure that students with limited reading and spelling abilities can successfully and happily complete.

Another advantage of a sentence-first approach; reading, spelling and sentence writing are developed as a single interconnected ability—not as separate skills taught in isolated and time-consuming blocks. When taught in unison, these essential abilities reinforce each other, leading to noticeable progress. By the end of an initial lesson, students are reading and spelling complex words in elaborate sentences.

"Core language deficits, particularly vocabulary, morphology, sentence construction and expressive language, are not just correlated with reading difficulties but are core causal factors.” Snowling and Hulme (2005)

This Struggle is Personal

I’m Bruce Howlett, a former biology researcher and the host of For the Love of Literacy podcast. I struggled with reading, spelling and writing for decades. When I went to teach a science course at a school for disadvantaged teens, I realized that their literacy difficulties were similar to mine. I then became a special education teacher, and applied my research background to investigate reading, writing and spelling difficulties.

I spent the next two decades investigating the causes of—and a comprehensive solution for—literacy difficulties, not just reading disabilities. While I found partial answers, from phonemic awareness to speech-to-print, my students and still struggled to read, spell and writing for enjoyment.

Four years ago, I threw out all the lessons I created over the years, and decided to develop methods based on the most recent research findings. This connected me with scores of people—many of whom have been featured on the podcast—who are creating innovative literacy solutions.

With their help, I created a set of activities, discussed below, that have finally permitted my students to love reading, and not fear spelling and writing. I compiled the activities into Sparking the Reading Shift which comes in two versions: a 12-lesson enrichment program for students reading at or below grade level, as well as a 16-lesson intervention for students experiencing prolonged literacy difficulties.

I want to show you how you can modify the Reading Shift activities, displayed here, to target your students' specific literacy difficulties, as well as transform them into scaffolds that provide pre-reading “rehearsal practice” giving your below-grade level readers access to above-grade level text.

Read, Spell, Write & Comprehend Sentences From the Start

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Sentence comprehension strongly predicts and largely determines text comprehension. So, the goal of a sentence-first approach is to intentionally strengthen the core language deficits listed above, by focusing on the three meaningful layers of language:

Sentences form the first, or syntactic, layer which defines the arrangement of words and phrases in well-formed, meaningful sentences.
Words and phrases, the semantic layer, which includes vocabulary knowledge, are the core of sentences.
Morphology, the study of morphemes, which form the core of every word in every language on the planet.

These three layers overlap with the biggest barriers to text comprehension for all readers:

Sentences with multiple phrases
Words with multiple morphemes or syllables
unfamiliar vocabulary words

A sentence-first approach not only builds a broad literacy foundation, but it also removes the barriers to text comprehension.

Unscramble the Sentences Challenge is a good example of how a sentence-first approach builds foundational abilities as well as eases text reading. This activity merges reading, spelling and writing, and also engages students' linguistic and reasoning abilities. Students are presented with two three-phrase sentences with the phrases scrambled. They first read the phrases, with help if needed, and then figure out how to arrange them in grammatical order. Once they have done this orally, they first write and then read the sentences. Students view this activity much like a word game, which motivates them to complete it -- including the sentence writing.

To make this activity, simply pick two challenging, three-phrase sentences from a text you are reading in class. Then scramble the phrases and proceed as above. This pre-reading activity, called rehearsal practice, significantly boosts fluency and comprehension.

This approach allows all students, regardless of their decoding or spelling abilities, to immediately read, spell and write complex sentences.

Phrases - Connecting Words and Sentences

Phrases, a fundamental building block of sentences in all languages, are sentence fragments that contain either a noun or a verb, but not both.

Phrases form an simple bridge between words in isolation and their use in sentences by breaking them into easily understood parts. Misunderstanding a single phrase in a sentence often throws the comprehension of the whole sentence off.

By grouping words together, phrases enrich language. A noun phrase like the polite boy has richer meaning than the individual words. Phrases that are metaphors, like a heart of gold or in safe hands also enhance expressive language.

This activity, paraphrasing, is a powerful way of improve comprehension. Simple pick a challenging sentence and have your students sequentially “translate” the phrases into simpler language. Use this activity to boost vocabulary knowledge, too.

There are four phrase activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

Phrases, Prosody and Fluency

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A sentence-first, phrase-focused approach includes prosody practice. Prosody, reading phrases in sentences with appropriate tempo and emphasis, enhances fluency and comprehension.

This activity combines repeated reading with prosody practice. Simply divide a challenging sentence or paragraph into phrases. Then build a sentence pyramid, starting with one phrase on the first line, and adding a phrase on each successive line. The student slowly reads a line, pausing at each slash mark. Repeat each line until the student doesn’t sound like a robot.

Speed is not the goal. Smooth, expressive reading is. I haven't met a dyslexic or delayed student who couldn't read these passages fluently during our first session together.

Phrase reading with prosody consistently raises reading comprehension by a grade-level or more. It is as effective and more efficient than repeatedly reading a whole chapter. If you need help dividing a text into phrases, ask AI.

This activity is included in each lesson of Sparking the Reading Shift. It is also used as rehearsal practice in Sparking the Fluency Shift, a collection of 36 short stories arranged by levels of text complexity. Each story is preceded by two pages of prereading rehearsal practice to build fluency and comprehension the more difficult words and sentences.

Morphemes -- The Core of Every Word

The third level of language is morphology, the study of how words are constructed around morphemes, the minimal units of meaning. Every word in all the world’s languages is either a morpheme by itself, like little, power, or small, or constructed around a base morpheme, like con+struct+ion, re+teach+ing and un+quest+ion+able.

Morphemes are central to developing orthographic (sight word) mapping, spelling, and vocabulary knowledge, and to reading and spelling multisyllabic—really poly-morphemic—words.

Students develop morphological awareness in two ways: build words by adding affixes to a base morpheme and break a word down into its composite morphemes.

This morphological word sum activity shows how how all complex words are constructed. In this example, overbaked is causing decoding, spelling and/or vocabulary challenges. Using Wordsearcher, you find words with the same base <bak(e)>, which you list as word sums.

The student spells the word out loud, letter-by-letter as he writes the word; "b-a-k-e plus ing is rewritten as b-a-k- replace the e-ing." This teaches a consistent suffixing convention--when a word ends in an e and the suffix begins with a vowel, the final e is dropped.

Students with limited spelling and reading abilities can immediately spell and read longer words using word sums. This activity is found in every lesson of Sparking the Reading Shift.

The Morphological Matrix and Word Sum

There is an almost perfect correlation between the growth of morphological knowledge and vocabulary knowledge – Wagner et al. (2007)

A powerful way to both build and break words is with a morphological matrix. Matrixes organize words around a common base, in this example <form> because my students were struggling to read and spell transformer. Using the matrix they added affixes to <form>, then wrote them as word sums.

The teacher gives them the matrix as a word game. They must find words with more than one morpheme. First, they drew lines between affixes and the base. Then they write the word sum and the completed word, as they it out and read the words.

This list of words creates morphological word family, words which share a general sense of meaning and a consistent spelling. This method increases vocabulary knowledge as morphological knowledge is almost perfectly related.

Matrix practice also enhancing spelling, avoiding memorizing individual words by developing spelling-meaning, or grapheme - morpheme, connections. These are stronger than sound-symbol connections as the pronunciation of a poly-morphemic word will shift but the spelling and meaning is consistent.

Listen to the pronunciation, of the s, i and g in sign, signature, resign, re-sign, and designate. While the spelling and meaning of <sign> is consistent, the pronunciation of the words shift.

A sentence-first approach doesn’t neglect word recognition skills, including decoding, phonemic awareness and phoneme-grapheme work. There are three word-recognition activities in each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift.

This word chain activity builds word building practice by successively shifting the sounds in words to change their pronunciation and meaning. It tackles the more difficult phoneme-grapheme relationships as groups, including middle vowel sounds and initial consonant clusters, not as isolated sounds and symbols.

Using the provided word list, the instructor simply states, “this is send. Change the /d/ in send to a /t/. What is the new word? Say it, spell it and then read it. Now, let’s change the /s/ in sent to a /b/. What word do you get?”

This activity requires five phoneme abilities: phoneme isolation, discrimination, segmentation, substitution and blending. Initially students will laboriously step through these tasks. Soon they begin to internalize the process, immediately pronouncing the new word. This facilitates the shift from decoding to sight word, or orthographic mapping.

While this is a very powerful word reading activity, the morpheme, phrase and sentence activities also solidify word recognition abilities. If you like playing word games, then you’ll enjoy making word chains.

Building Word Recognition Skills

“Reading words and spelling words are two sides of a coin” Linnea Ehri

Sparking the Reading Shift

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Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift contains 12 activities that span the sentence, phrase, morpheme and word levels of language. As you have seen, students are constantly reading, spelling and writing in an undivided manner.

The activities contain words proficient readers and writer frequently use. To produce the activities, I simple asked myself, "what type of words and sentence structures do I want my special education students to read, spell and write?" This created a higher expectation that my students routinely met.

The activities are presented as word games, or challenges, Each page is a ready-to-use word and sentence activity, with brief instruction. A thirty-minute session 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.

Sparking the Reading Shift comes in two versions, for seven-to-seventeen y/o. Language-literacy Intervention ($28) contains16 one-hour lessons. This version is for students who have required extensive instruction from special education, classroom or reading teachers.

Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Enrichment ($18) contains 120 page,12 hour lessons in a consumable workbook format. This version contains the same word, morphological, phrase and sentence activities as in Language-literacy Intervention but in a briefer, 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

See a sample lesson below

Grade-level Reading with Fluency Scaffolds

In combined language-literacy learning, word, vocabulary and sentence activities have another purpose; they are easily transformed into scaffolds that give below-grade-level readers immediate access to at- or above-grade-level text.

To grow as readers, students need practice with complex text that expands their abilities far beyond what decodable and leveled books provide. In his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Timothy Shanahan shows that the greatest growth in comprehension as well as reading engagement comes from text that contains challenging words, sentences and vocabulary, not from text that offers little to learn or figure out.

Shanahan promotes the use of rehearsal practice, prereading fluency activities where students practice the more difficult words, vocabulary and sentences before they are encountered in a text. Teacher simply picks out a handful of these elements, using them as the text for the word and sentences activities described above. Rehearsal practice repeatedly raises fluency and comprehension abilities by over a grade level when compared to cold reading of the same text.

The scaffolds should be of a desirable level of difficulty, just difficult enough to focus a student’s attention and language skills. Too easy limits learning, too hard overwhelms the student.

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 one or two grades above their actual grade. 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 that boosts fluency and comprehension.

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, challenging vocabulary, as well as to complex sentences containing multiple phrases. When these words and sentences are encountered in a text they are read with greater fluency, accuracy and comprehension.

Research shows that this approach significantly improves fluency, provides at least a grade-level improvement in comprehension and expands vocabulary knowledge over a cold read of the same text. 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.

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 word 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 interruption. Reading becomes an easier, engaging & enriching activity – not just an academic task.

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

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.

A Combined Language-Literacy Lesson

Here are the activities that develop combined language-literacy learning, as well as provide the format for word, morphological, phrase and sentence scaffolds. In Sparking the Reading Shift, each activity is called a challenge, providing practice with a desirable level of difficulty.