Teaching and learning literacy can be exhausting when we overlook critical word, phrase and sentence components of literacy. For example, teaching:

Decoding without morphemes—which provide critical pronunciation and meaning information, and syntax—which finalizes this information in sentences.
Multisyllabic word reading without learning how every longer word in English is either a morpheme by itself or built from suffixes, prefixes and a meaningful.
Spelling without learning how graphemes—letter patterns—and morphemes—word patterns—combine to spell all words.
Vocabulary without morphology, as it helps define words.
Fluency without phrases and sentences, the most important components of smooth, meaningful reading.
Sentence writing without syntax, the blueprint for arranging words and phrases into rich and meaningful sentences.
Comprehension without syntax, which defines the meaningful relationships between words and phrases, providing the strongest influence on text comprehension.

Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift provide critical morphological, phrase, syntactic and fluency instruction, developing reading, spelling and sentence writing as a meaningful and interconnected system. The lessons and reading practice are designed for immediate use, requiring no training or special knowledge.

Seven Layers of Literacy

Delayed, dyslexic and simply disinterested students often spend years learning to read, but then rarely pick up a book for enjoyment. For these students, writing is also viewed as just another academic task, rather than a way to express one’s thoughts and emotions.

This situation is largely avoidable. Recent breakthroughs in research have led to methods that develop proficient and engaged readers, spellers and writers.

Sparking the Reading Shift distills these methods into twelve supplemental lessons that develop The Seven Layers of Literacy. The lessons unify reading, spelling and sentence writing into a single intertwined ability.

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In each lesson, students progress from reading and spelling simple words to building longer words out of morphemes (in+struct +ion), the meaningful core of words in all languages.They then create two-word natural pairs (ice cream, best friends), followed by three-word phrases (the kind student), the universal building blocks of sentences. Finally, students combine phrases into complex sentences.

The Seven Layers of Literacy was inspired by leading researchers who take a multicomponent approach. They include Maryanne Wolf’s POSSuM word study, Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright’s Bridging Processes, and Charles Perfetti’s Lexical Quality Hypothesis.

David Share’s theory, which I call The Combining Principle, states that students across the planet learn to read by initially combining a limited but learnable set of sounds and symbols into morphemes. Universally, they go on to combine words into phrases and sentences.

These theories center on three critical—but often overlooked—components of literacy development: Morpheme, phrases and syntax. Together, they form the foundation for reading comprehension, written expression and literacy enjoyment.

• Morphemes are the universal building blocks of words - Word reading, spelling, and vocabulary development all center around morphemes. In all the world's languages, written words are either units of meaning by themselves, like teach, water and power, or contain a core morpheme, called a base, like in+struct+ion, struct+ur+al and re+con+struct. Morphemes, along with graphemes, form the core of our spelling system, creating spelling-meaning connections. Morphological instruction is a powerful way of expanding vocabulary knowledge.

• Phrases are the universal building blocks of sentences - Phrases span the gap between words and sentences. Phrases are groups of words that contain either a noun or a verb, but not both. Most sentences contain a noun phrase, telling who or what (The kind student), a verb phrase that tells what and how the noun is doing (talked slowly). They also amplify the meaning of words. The young student has far more meaning than the individual words. Prosody, reading with expression, is based on reading sentences phrase-by-phrase.

• Syntax provides the universal blueprint for building sentences by arranging words and phrases into a meaningful order. Without syntax, sentences don't make sense - Slowly student the talked kind lunch during. Syntax is the layer of language that matters most for reading comprehension and fluency. Syntax is the key to written expression. Text comprehension is heavily influenced by sentence comprehension

Reading and Writing Fluency are tightly linked and are best developed together. The ability to recognize words on sight as we read is tied to our ability to retrieve them from memory as we spell and write.

A seven layers of literacy lesson produces a noticeable improvement in student achievement and engagement and a much-needed boost in confidence, interest and motivation. This makes teaching more enriching and enjoyable.

Why This Approach?

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I'm Bruce Howlett, a special education teacher and a former research biologist. I also host the For the Love of Literacy Podcast Spotify Apple Podcasts, where we discuss innovative language, literacy and learning methods based on current research and innovative methods.

These issues are personal as I struggled with reading, spelling and writing skills well into my forties. I then used my research background to create lessons that merged phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping, which became popular throughout the English-speaking world.

For the next two decades, I created stronger methods that helped me and my students read without effort. However, spelling, sentence writing and complex text still presented difficulties. So, four years ago, I threw out decades of lessons and decided to build new ones based solely on current research breakthroughs and emerging approaches.

With the help of my podcast guests, I incorporated this learning into Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift. Below is a Reading Shift lesson, followed by an explanation of Fluency Shift reading practice. My students now fully enjoy reading and willingly engage in classroom writing assignments.

My students, from six-to-sixteen, look forward to the lessons and the activities focus their attention while respecting their cognitive and language abilities. They also enjoy the challenges presented in each activity, which they approach as word problems they want to figure out.

And now in my seventies, I read constantly, enjoy writing and spelling no longer disrupts my thought process. There is no reason for students to struggle like I did.

Layer One
Reading & Spelling Single Morpheme Words

The Challenge - figure out how sound, spelling and meaning work together to create new words that are easy to read accurately and with understanding. .

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 student then writes and reads the word, helping to store it in memory.

Sparking the Reading Shift contains two additional word recognition activities.

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

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Layer Two
Recognizing Morpheme Patterns

The Challenge - figure out how to identify, read and spell morphemic patterns in words. This is the key to independently figuring out the pronunciation and meaning of complex words. All longer English words are composed of a base morpheme plus prefixes and suffixes, as needed.

In this challenge, students first circle the prefixes and suffixes, revealing the base word. They write the base, then spell each word as a "word sum" which solidifies its structure, spelling and meaning. Finally, they show their understanding of the word by using it in a sentence.

While other methods often wait months or years to introduce multisyllabic words, Reading Shift introduces them during the first lesson.

Layer Three
Building Poly-Morphemic Words

The Challenge -- figure out how to combine prefixes and suffixes with base morphemes to build complex words.

Morphological Word Sums

Students practice adding affixes to a base. Then they write the word and then read it. "P-l-ay plus s is rewritten as p-l-ay-s, plays." This is a proven way of learning to decode, spell and memorize words. Six-year-old dyslexics successfully complete this activity on the first try.

Morphological Matrix

This activity builds on the previous one, creating a morphological word family of related words. Students first read the affixes and the base, then they draw lines to connect the morphemes, creating complex words. They then write the word sum, re+ act + ing , and then the whole word. If the student gets stuck the teacher simply 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)

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Layer Four
Building Natural Word Pairs

The Challenge: Now that students have a handle on single words it's time to combine them into phrases.

Two Word Natural Pairs (Collocations)
Students must figure out which words can be combined into meaningful pairs. This activity combines reading, meaning making and spelling. Students used to simple word reading instruction enjoy completing this challenging task.

Three Word Phrase Building
Next, students must figure out how to make meaningful phrases, the building blocks of sentences. Students who enjoy this language task far more than word reading exercises.

Layer Five
Connecting Phrases to Sentences

Linguistic Challenge -- figure out the correct order of phrases to make a meaningful sentence. This activity is often used to assess sentence comprehension.

Students read two sets of three phrases that are out of order, with help if needed, and then order the phrases into a meaningful sentence. Then they write the phrases.

There are four additional phrase activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

Layer Six
Writing & Understanding Complex Sentences

The Instructional Shift - Syntactic activities help students understand that sentences are not just strings of words. Instead, students learn the meaningful relationships between groups of words in phrases and phrases in sentences.

The Linguistic Challenge - The Build a Better Sentence Challenge is a paraphrasing activity, where students figure out how to swap phrases to change the meaning of a sentence. This deeper understanding of sentences is strongly correlated with text comprehension.

The Sentence Matrix Challenge students get to pick the phrases that make up sentences. Combining phrases is not only a powerful way of developing writing abilities, but gives students a say in their writing.

The Seven Layers of Literacy approach eases students into writing so that they experience continuous success. As a result, resistance fades.

Layer Seven
Word, Phrase & Sentence Fluency

Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift end with either a Sentence Step Challenge, for word-to-sentence fluency practice, or a Read Slow and Smooth Challenge, which provides prosody practice.

Theses activities provide repeated reading practice. The prosody activity breaks sentences into phrases. 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.

Enhanced Fluency and Comprehension Practice
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.

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 practice with these challenges. Shanahan promotes rehearsal practice, which he says 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

Sparking the Reading Shift

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 activities are presented as word games, or challenges, Each page is a ready-to-use word or sentence activity, complete with word lists and brief instruction.

A thirty-minute session once or twice a week is enough to quickly produce noticeable growth. There is no need to stick to a fixed schedule as spreading a lesson out over a week or so produces satifisfactory results.

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 ($32) contains 16 one-hour lessons. This version is for students who have required extensive support from special education, classroom or reading teachers. Designed for students seven years through secondary school.

Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Enrichment ($22) 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. Designed for students six years through secondary school.

If you are unsure of which version to use, then start with Language-literacy Enrichment.

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).