The Literacy Cycle
Giving Your Students a Fresh Relationship with Print

Are your six-to-sixteen-year-old 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 choppy? What your students need most is a fresh, more meaningful and engaging relationship with print. The Literacy Cycle is designed to build this relationship while simplifying and enlivening instruction.

The Literacy Cycle develops reading, spelling and sentence writing as a single, sensible and interconnected ability. In a single Literacy Cycle lesson (graphic) students progress through six stages, advancing from single syllable word spelling and decoding, to constructing words with multiple morphemes, the building blocks of all words. They then combine two and three words together to create phrases, the building blocks of sentences. Finally, they arrange phrases in different types of sentences.

At this point, a Literacy Cycle lesson is only half complete. Students practice breaking sentences into phrases, phrases into words, and words into morphemes. They then divide multi-syllable (really poly-morphemic) words into individual morphemes, and then analyze spelling patterns.

By the end of the first hour-long lesson, students are reading and spelling multi-syllabic words in complex sentences. They have learned how the components of literacy work together in an integrated manner. Spellings flow into words, that seamlessly combine into phrases and sentences.

The spelling and morpheme stages of The Literacy Cycle establish a deeper relationship with words, linking their pronunciation, spelling and meaning. At the heart of this new understanding is the morpheme, which plays a critical role in spelling, word recognition and vocabulary. Every word in all the world’s languages is either a morpheme by itself, like water, little or teach, or composed of a core morpheme, called a base, plus prefixes and suffixes, like con+struct+ion and quest+ion+ing. Spelling becomes grounded in meaning.

The next two stages of the Literacy Cycle build a deep relationship with sentences, where words come alive and comprehension begins. Sentences are universally composed of meaningful words and phrases. Students start by building two and three word phrases, and then combine phrases into complex sentences. Sentence construction and comprehension follow naturally.

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The Spelling Stage shifts the relationship with words from the least interesting and meaningful aspects of language—letters, sounds and syllables—into a sensible meaning-building process. The primary job of our spelling system is to convey meaning, which it does by using graphemes, letter patterns, to spell morphemes. Only morphemes provide the spelling, pronunciation and meaning information needed to store sight words in memory.
The Morpheme Stage further shifts the relationship with print, showing students how all words are composed of morphemes. This understanding changes how they learn to spell, decode and learn new vocabulary words. Longer words are seen as combinations of simple morphemes, like con+struct+ion and per+fect+ion. Words no longer exist in isolation, but have clear relationships with other words. Almost all common word are members of morphological word families with related spellings, history and meanings, as with heal - healthy, sign - designate - signature, quest - question - request, two - twin - twenty, as well as one, once and only.
The Phrase Stage presents students with another universal aspect of language. Phrases are simply meaningful word combinations that contain either a noun or a verb, but not both. Phrases form a powerful bridge between word level skills and sentence construction and comprehension. In each Sparking the Reading Shift lesson, students first build two-word phrases composed of natural pairs, such as ice cream and making friends. Then, they build three-word noun phrases, like the kind teacher, verb phrases like talking very quietly, and prepositional phrases like in the park. They are now ready for the ultimate stage.
The Sentence Stage puts words and phrases into functional and meaningful relationships, which amplifies their meaning. No longer just an academic task, sentence writing now flows from a deeper understand of words and phrase, bringing words to life. Instead, students learn how sentences give their thoughts and feelings a voice. Sentence comprehension largely determines text level comprehension.

Completing the Literacy Cycle

I've only shown you half of the Literacy Cycle lesson. Equally important are the stages where students deconstruct sentences back into phrases, words into morphemes and graphemes.

Students also learn to manipulate phrases and morphemes, a higher level language task. A powerful reading comprehension activity is paraphrase, where students rewrite phrases in sentences with challenging vocabulary words into simpler language that they readily understand.

The same deconstruction and manipulation process occurs at the morpheme stage. Students pick an unfamiliar poly-morphemic word and investigate its base. Then they switch up the affixes to create morphological word families.

Paraphrasing and building morphological word families enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge and make reading unfamiliar words much easier.

Before I show you a Literacy Cycle lesson I'd like to introduce myself and the reading enrichment and text reading lessons I created. I'm Bruce Howlett, a special education teacher, and the host of the For the Love of Literacy Podcast Spotify Apple Podcasts where we explore ways to create more meaningful relationships with print. I'm also a former research biologist who struggled with reading, spelling and writing into my forties. Then, I went to teach science at a residential school for teens with emotional and learning challenges. I soon realized that their struggles with literacy paralleled mine. I also saw that the school's varied literacy methods were time consuming yet marginally effective. I decided to apply my research training to explore innovative methods that might end my students' literacy struggles—as well as mine.

I spent the next two decades in this pursuit. While I found partial answers, from phonemic awareness to speech-to-print, my students and I continued to struggle to read, spell and write for enjoyment. Four years ago, I threw out all the lessons I had created over the decades and started fresh, creating activities based solely on recent research and emerging methods. I was aided by scores of like-minded educators and researchers, many of whom have been guests on the podcast.

With their help, I created a set of activities based on The Literacy Cycle that enabled my students to embrace literacy instruction as an engaging, enriching and meaningful experience. I compiled the activities into Sparking the Reading Shift, with a 12-lesson enrichment version for students reading at or below grade level, as well as a 16-lesson intervention for students experiencing prolonged literacy difficulties.

I'd like to show you how simple Literacy Cycle activities are to create, using the Sparking the Reading Shift lesson plan.

The Literacy Cycle Lesson Plan

A Literacy Cycle lesson advances students' reading, spelling and writing in a step-by-step and integrated manner, from single words to complex sentences. Each activity is only slightly more difficult, and builds on the skills learned in the previous steps. Almost all students, regardless of ability, can read, spell and comprehend complex sentences by the end of the first lesson.

The Literacy Cycle lesson also provides more equable instruction than most reading intervention and improvement methods. For example, rather than focusing on single syllable words, the first Sparking the Reading Shift lesson progresses through all six stages of the cycle.

Students receive much richer and more engaging language instruction that more closely resembles the education that their more typically developing classmates. Since most reading difficulties are rooted in language development, richer language instruction is essential.

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Spelling - The First and Final Stage

The Literacy Cycle starts and ends with the selling stage. The first activity is phoneme substitution word chains. The student is given a word, spit, and asked to change one phoneme, /t/ to /n/, to create a new word with a different pronunciation and meaning. This requires phoneme segmentation, manipulation and blending abilities.

The teacher says, "Tell me the word you get when you change the /t/ in spit to an /n/" The student says each sound while writing the corresponding letters. They then read and write the new word.

This activity provides practice with two of the most challenging aspects of decoding, consonant clusters, like tr and dr, as well as medial vowel shifts. Students with limited decoding and spelling abilities successful master these patterns after a few lessons. They learn that a one phoneme-grapheme shift creates a new morpheme.

There are two addition sound-spelling-meaning activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

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

The Morpheme Stage

The English spelling system is morpho-phonemic, with graphemes often representing phonemes in morphemes. Spellings represent meaning, so students should learn to spell what the word means, not just what it sounds like. English spellings favor consistent meaning over pronunciation. While the pronunciation of words shift, like heal to health and please to pleasure, the underlying meaning of the words is retained. Spelling-meaning relationships also aid in vocabulary and sight word development.

Morphological Word Sums

Students learn how all multi-syllabic / poly-morphemic words are created in English. Students are giving a list of word sums with a common base. They say the word and spell the affixes. Then they write the word and read it. Students who have long struggled with literacy are soon reading and spelling complex words. Morphological learning is also generative; students easily transfer this ability to untaught words.

The lower activity, Morphological Matrix, gives students the ability to create a morphological word family by combining easy-to-read morphemes. Students first read the affixes and the base, then they try to find words that they know. They draw lines to make the word reacting. They then write the word sum, re+ act + ing , and then write the whole word as they spell it. If the student gets stuck, the teacher asks, "What is re plus act plus ive?"

There are five morphological activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

There is an almost perfect correlation between the growth of morphological knowledge and vocabulary knowledge.

– Wagner et al. (2007)

The Two and Three Word Phrase Stage

The next small step involves combining words into phrases, first two word natural pairs, and then three word phrases.

Most of the activities in Sparking the Reading Shift requires students to actively attend to the structure of words and engage their linguistic abilities. In these activities, the teacher just tells the students to find phrases that make sense, draw lines between them, then write and read the phrases.

If the student can't initially read the words, the teacher reads them. Then the student reads the words while searching for phrases. This reasoning, reading, spelling and rereading process solidifies the phrases in memory.

The Combining Phrase Stage

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In Building Sentences with Phrases Challenge students read two sets of three-phrase sentences where the phrases are scrambled. After the read the sentences in grammatical order, they write the completed sentences. Finally, they read the sentences, again. After reading, spelling and writing the words in sentences almost all students have committed the words to sight word memory.

There are five phrase activities in each Sparking the Reading Shift lesson.

Phrases, Prosody and Fluency

Phrases are important to fluency, as well. Prosody, reading phrases in sentences with appropriate tempo and emphasis, enhances fluency and comprehension.

The first few lessons in Sparking the Reading Shift end with The Sentence Step Challenge, where each line is one word longer than the line before it. Not only does this provide much needed repeated reading practice, but even students with limited decoding abilities easily read these sentences - usually with great pride.

The Read Slow and Smooth Challenge provides the same repeated reading practice, but with phrases to develop comprehension-boosting prosody. The student slowly reads a line, pausing at each slash mark. They repeat the line until they read it smoothly, not like a robot. Speed is not the goal. Smooth, expressive reading is.

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.

I haven't met a dyslexic or delayed student who couldn't read these passages fluently during our first session together.

Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift ends with a stepped word or phrase reading activity. This activity is also used for 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 (see below).

Sentences - The Top of the Literacy Cycle

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We have taken delayed, dyslexic and disinterested students from figuring out single syllable words, to reading and spelling poly-morphemic words while writing sentences with multiple phrases--in a single lesson.

The Sentence Matrix Challenge gives students a structure that enables them to successfully write complex sentences of their own making. Students simple pick the combinations of phrases that they want to read and write. This promotes the critical feeling of self-efficacy, the belief in your ability to succeed, which drives motivation.

Put it in Your Own Words Challenge builds sentence awareness and comprehension through paraphrasing. Working on one phrase at a time, students rewrite it, using simpler words. The teacher help with vocabulary, as needed. Again, I've never met a student who resisted writing in this manner.

There are four sentence building activities in each Sparking the Reading lesson. The great variety of short activities that students are able to successfully complete keeps attention and motivation high.

Sparking the Reading Shift

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As you have seen, Sparking the Reading Shift is committed to student success through the use of a great variety of challenging activities that reframe how students, and often their teachers, approach literacy learning.

The key to student success is treating reading, spelling and sentence writing as a seamless process. Expectations are kept high, but attainable. When I created 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?" Then I made each stage in the Literacy Cycle only slightly more difficult. We went at a pace that suited each student. They often grew excited when they discovered the secrets behind spelling, word meaning and sentence composition and comprehension.

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 is used for RTI, or as supplemental instruction. It is compatible with the full range of literacy approaches. There is no prep involved and is designed for new teachers and homeschooling parents to use without training.

Sparking the Reading Shift comes in two versions: 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.

Sparking the Fluency Shift

I was dissatisfied with the progress my students were making reading decodables and leveled books. I also wanted to bring the advantages of the Literacy Cycle to reading practice. So, I created Sparking the Fluency Shift, a collection of 36 one-page stories, each of increasing complexity and length.

The stories start at a basic first grade (~6 y/o) to a solid sixth grade level. I wanted to give my students the opportunity to read above grade level, as all their proficient peers do.

There are up to eight stories per grade level. Each story is slightly, but noticeably more difficult than the previous story, which provides much needed motivation. With such small steps between each story, readers often progress to a more difficult story every few weeks.

Each story is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice, prereading fluency and comprehension boosting exercises that complement the stages in the Literacy Cycle. The more difficult spellings, poly-morphemic words and vocabulary, and complex phrases and sentences from each story are extracted and put into reading activities that are similar to those in Sparking the Fluency Shift.

Each story is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice activities. By practicing the hard parts to fluency beforehand, students go on to read the story with greater fluency, accuracy and comprehension—and with the need for far fewer corrections.

In his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Timothy Shanahan shows that the greatest growth in comprehension and reading engagement comes from text that contain challenging words, sentences and vocabulary. Sparking the Fluency Shift provides exactly these challenges. Shanahan promotes rehearsal practice, which he shows raises comprehension scores by a grade level or more over a cold reading of the same material.

Rehearsal practice is at the heart of each story in Sparking the Fluency Shift ($20). Each of the thirty-six, 150-to-400-word stories is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice covering the challenging words and sentences.

The topics and the content for the stories were chosen by my very judgmental preteen and teenage students. The topics range from making friends and resolving conflicts, to fantasy stories about time travel.

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).