When Reading, Spelling, Sentence Writing and Fluency are Taught Simultaneously
As educators and researchers, we had grown dissatisfied with our students’ reading, spelling and writing progress and lack of engagement. The 30 years of flat reading comprehension scores on the NAEP, the 'national reading report card,' also troubled us. So, we did what researchers often do when they want new solutions to longstanding problems; we threw out all the lessons and programs that we had developed over two decades, and started over by reviewing only recent research. This led us to a surprising number of fresh ideas and innovative methods that reinvigorated literacy instruction for our students and us.
Since very little research contains classroom-ready methods, we found six guiding concepts, described below, that form the foundation for current literacy research. We then used these concepts to create 14 activities for our dyslexic, underperforming, and increasingly, disinterested readers. After modifying the activities over three years to improve their effectiveness, ease of instruction and acceptance by our students, we created Sparking the Reading Shift, a 16-lesson language-literacy intervention and a 12-lesson language-literacy enrichment program.
Creating Sparking the Reading Shift not only deepened our love of language and sparked a fascination for words while reading and writing in our students. While we value their improved fluency and comprehension, we are most impressed with the graphic novels that they create.
Before we explain this fresh approach to literacy instruction, let's look at these concepts:
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Language and literacy development are inseparable.
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Spoken languages abilities, from sounds to oral sentences, as well as vocabulary knowledge, don't just predict reading and writing progress, but largely determine it.
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Spoken language abilities are expressed in written language, or orthography, in a variety of ways, including groupings of graphemes (letters) in morphemes (the meaningful core of all words), morphemes in words, words in phrases and sentences.
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Multiple components of literacy are best taught simultaneously. Reading, spelling and writing should be taught as a single ability, not as separate skills.
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Most importantly, language and literacy instruction should be integrated, in a unified manner within single lessons. In practical terms, by the end of the first lesson, your students will be reading and spelling words with multiple syllables and morphemes in complex sentences.
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The power of integration becomes clear when we saw the near perfect correlation between word reading and spelling, the spelling of morphemes with graphemes, morphological and vocabulary knowledge, automatic spelling and fluent word reading, and sentence and text-level comprehension. There is no reason to teach these as separate skills.
As a result, Sparking the Reading Shift is an integrated, multicomponent approach to literacy that shows students the various ways that the four major components of spoken language are represented in our spelling system, or orthography. Students learn how the four components, phonemic sounds, morphemes - the meaning core of all words, semantics - meaningful words and phrases, and meaningful sentence construction, or syntax, are expressed in increasingly complex ways in the our writing system.
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Sparking the Reading Shift also incorporates the latest findings from the cognitive sciences of learning. Each of the 10 brief activities in each lesson (see sample lesson, below) are set up as challenges to maximize attention, engagement and motivation. Students learn to play with word patterns, phrases and sentences as if they are just a set of linguistic Legos. They actively learn to put words and sentences together, take them apart and switch them up to make new linguistic creations – like a set of interlocking blocks. Students become:
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Word Detectives who solve the mystery of unfamiliar words by uncovering familiar spellings and morphemes in complex words
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Pattern Finders who find sound, spelling and meaning patterns in words with multiple syllables and morphemes, as well as in sentences.
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Word Builders who build words out of sounds / phonemes, letters / graphemes and the core of all words, morphemes. They know how to build phrases, an important part of language, and sentences out of words. All the pieces of language fit together in a sensible manner.
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Demolishing Experts who break down sentences into phrases, pull out words with multiple morphemes from phrases, and break up morphemes into in letters and graphemes.
Sparking the Reading Shift is based on the powerful concept of desirable difficulty; only by being appropriately challenged do students engage, attend and effectively learn in a durable manner. This is the concept behind popular games like Minecraft and digital language learning apps.
Sparking the Reading Shift comes in a16-lesson Language-Literacy Intervention ($28) for students who with significant reading difficulties, and a 12-lesson Language-Literacy Enrichment ($18) version for delayed, disinterested and underperforming grade-level readers.
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The Three Challenges
To go into the the challenges in more detail, there are three types of challenges:
Building Words Challenges focus on word, phrase and sentence pattern recognition and extension. The activities start by combining sounds (phonemes), spellings (graphemes) and morphemes, the meaningful core of every word in every language. Students first build words with single morphemes like sign and heal. They then combine morphemes to make longer words like signature and healthy, using morphological matrices - tables with a central base and related prefixes and suffixes. Words are then combined into phrases, a powerful intermediate step between words and sentences. Finally, they read, spell and create multi-phrase sentences.
Breaking Words Down Challenges focus on pattern analysis. starting by segmenting sentences into phrases and phrases into words. Multiple morpheme words, like outgrowing, are broken down using word sums - out + grow + ing. English morphemes have consistent relationships with graphemes and are easily broken down into these letter patterns - ou-t + g-r-ow + i-ng. This promotes spelling, word meaning and vocabulary growth.
Manipulation Challenges show students how words and sentences are built from interchangeable parts in a systematic way. Phonemes, graphemes and morphemes can be swapped to make new words. Shifting affixes turn words like act into actor, action, react, actual and enacting. Sentences can be manipulated using paraphrasing, by shifting noun, verb and prepositional phrases to make new sentences.
Sparking the Reading Shift 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 Reading Shift - Seven Key Concepts Derived From Current Research
Before starting Sparking the Reading Shift, project lead Bruce Howlett, a former biology researcher, threw out 20 years’ worth of reading lessons and programs that he had created, and started fresh, focusing on current research breakthroughs. He studied hundreds of recent research papers and talked with and listened to dozens of researchers and educators. He found seven key concepts that define current thinking on literacy development. He turned these concepts into the framework for Sparking the Reading Shift. These concepts are why Reading Shift doesn’t look like other reading programs, has so few lessons and produces noticeable progress in reading, spelling and writing. You can hear from many of these exciting and insightful people on Bruce’s podcast, For the Love of Literacy. These concepts are:
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Language and literacy instruction are inseparable as growth in spoken language abilities drives literacy progress.
“Core language deficits, particularly vocabulary, morphology, sentence construction and narrative development, are not just correlated with reading difficulties but are core causal factors.” Snowling and Hulme (2005)
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Reading, spelling, sentence writing and comprehension are best taught as a single, interdependent and self-strengthening system. Sentence level abilities strongly predict text level fluency and comprehension.
“If you want children to understand book language and use it when they write, then that is the language that you want to explicitly develop." Douglas Peterson, on For the Love of Literacy Podcast
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Complexity and Desirable Difficulty enable literacy growth. Written language isn’t just “speech written down,” rather it is five to 20 times more complex than conversational language. Early on, books are filled with challenging spellings, unfamiliar vocabulary words, and complex sentence structures. All readers make the greatest growth when reading text at or above-grade level, with pre-reading scaffolds provided for challenging words and sentences before they are encountered in text (see Sparking the Fluency Shift, below).
“It is the level of instructional support provided by the teacher, rather than the complexity of the text, that defines the level of text a student can successfully comprehend.” Struggle isn’t a Bad Word - Lupo, Strong and Conradi-Smith (2018)
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All languages in the world follow the Combining Principle. David Share’s breakthrough work shows that universally, phonemes in speech, and symbols such as graphemes in writing, combine into meaningful words composed of one or more morphemes. Words then combine into phrases and sentences. Across languages, readers reach the a “novice” level of effortless decoding, called phonological transparency. Then they reach an “expert” morphological transparency level where the meaning of an ever-growing number of words is clear. “Learning how words combine is as important as learning to read them singly.” Elfrieda Hiebert
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Integrated Multicomponent Instruction is critical to literacy learning, where the major components of spoken language are developed simultaneously with their written forms, or orthography. As discussed above, integrated instruction concurrently improves vocabulary and sight word knowledge, spelling and sentence comprehension. Duke and Cartwright’s Bridging Processes and Maryanne Wolf and colleagues’ POSSuM approach are prime examples.
“If you teach things separately, like P.A., phonics, vocabulary, morphology, and grammar, etcetera, you are doing violence to the way language, and the reading and writing system really work. Because these things are not actually independent.” Mark Seidenberg
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Developing meaning is essential to all aspects of literacy learning. English has a very reliable spelling-meaning, or grapheme-morpheme relationships, composing every written word. On a recent For the Love of Literacy podcast, Linnea Ehri told Bruce Howlett that these grapheme-morpheme connections become the predominate way that words are stored in sight word memory. Furthermore, morphological and vocabulary knowledge have a nearly one-to-one relationship. Sentences magnify the meaning of words, as comprehension is a word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence process of building meaning.
“The all too often missing links are our omission of explicit knowledge about what words mean, how they are used grammatically, and how morphemes change their meaning and use.”
“There is never a time when comprehension skills (even through the simplest forms of connected text like two-word sentences) are neglected in the acquisition process.” Maryanne Wolf
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. ​
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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 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 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, both for seven-to-seventeen y/o.
Language-literacy Intervention ($28) contains 150 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 ​​​​​​
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.
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.​
