Sparking the Reading Shift
Reading and Spelling Multisyllabic Words in Sentences on Day One
Sparking the Fluency Shift
Fluent, Grade-Level Reading Through Rehearsal Practice in Weeks
As educators and researchers, we had grown dissatisfied with our students’ slow reading, spelling and writing progress, as well as their lack of engagement. We were also troubled by thirty years of flat reading comprehension scores on the NAEP, the "national reading report card". 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 fresh by focusing on recent research.
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The resulting literacy lessons, Sparking the Reading Shift, allowed our special education, delayed and simply disinterested students to read and spell words in complex sentences by the end of the first lesson.
We were also dissatisfied with the progress that resulted from decodables and leveled books. So we created Sparking the Fluency Shift, 36 short stories, arranged by levels of readability from first to sixth grade, each preceded by comprehension and fluency enhancing retrieval practice. Within weeks our students were reading at grade level.
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​This may seem like an outrageous claim, but we did more than just create new lessons. Since very little research contains classroom-ready methods, we started by developing six guiding concepts, described below, that form the overarching framework for current literacy research.
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This research converges on integrated language-literacy development. Simply, every sentence that you read or write involves the four major components of spoken language--phonemes, morphemes-- the meaningful core of every word on the planet-- meaningful words (semantics), and sentences, or syntax.
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As shown in the graphic, these components are represented in print through a combining process where sounds and letters are turned into morphemes, and morphemes combine into words with multiple syllables and morphemes. Words then combine into phrases, and phrases combine into sentences.
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This combining approach and the six guiding concepts formed the framework for our literacy lessons, Sparking the Reading Shift, and the reading practice, Sparking the Fluency Shift. The14 activities and 36 stories were continually modified for three years to improve their effectiveness, ease of use, and, most importantly, acceptance by our students.
Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Intervention, ($28) is a 16-lesson language-literacy intervention for seven-to-seventeen y/o students with prolonged literacy struggles. We also created an abbreviated, 12-lesson version, Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Enrichment ($18) for six-to-sixteen-year-olds with less involved difficulties, including those reading at grade level.
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The graphic, right, shows how Sparking the Reading Shift integrates language-literacy instruction by developing reading, spelling and sentence writing as a single, self-reinforcing process. Each lesson follows a four-step process:
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First, the single word reading and spelling level. Students learn to turn graphemes, the letter patterns that spell phonemes, into morphemes, the meaningful core of every word. Graphemes and morphemes form spelling-meaning relationships, driving sight word reading and fluency.
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Next, the multisyllabic, or poly-morphemic, level. All longer words in both spoken and written language are constructed by adding prefixes and suffixes to morphemes. If you can read re, in, act, ing, ed and ion, you can read and spell ten longer words.
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Third, the phrase level, the building blocks of sentences. Phrases, combinations of words, are a great intermediate step between words and sentences. Understanding the role phrases play in sentences boosts fluency, comprehension and sentence writing abilities.
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Finally, sentences, the reason we learn to read and spell single words. Sentence comprehension strongly predicts and largely determines text level comprehension.
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Within each level students learn the three linguistic abilities that build a broad foundation for continued literacy success. As illustrated in the graphic, students:
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Build grapheme and morphemes into words, and words into phrases and sentences
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Break down sentences into phrases and words, and words into morphemes and graphemes.
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Manipulate phrases in sentences to make new sentences, the morphemes in phrases to enrich writing, and the phonemes and graphemes in morphemes to make new words.
See sample lesson below. This approach is so straightforward that training, even for new teachers and homeschoolers, is rarely required.
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Motivation and engagement are critical parts of Sparking the Reading Shift, which incorporates the latest findings from the cognitive sciences of learning. The activities are designed using 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, Lego sets and digital language learning apps such as Duolingo.
Each of the 10 brief activities in each lesson (see sample lesson, below) are set up as challenges to maximize attention and engagement. Nothing motivates like success, especially a student succeeds with a difficult task.
Sparking the Fluency Shift --Scaffolding Challenging Text with Rehearsal Practice
We were also concerned that our students weren't making sufficient progress using decodables and leveled books. The books’ limited word use, vocabulary and simple plot lines didn’t lead to noticeable leaps in fluency and comprehension, nor to a love of literacy. So, we created Sparking the Fluency Shift, ($20) a collection of 36 short stories with readability levels ranging from beginning first grade to a solid sixth grade level. This provides a path to above grade-level reading, a level typically achieved by fluent readers.
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To continually grow as readers, students need to be exposed to challenging words and complex sentences in increasingly difficult text. They also need help making sense of written language which is five to thirty times more complex than conversational language. 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 preferably, above 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 which boosts fluency and comprehension. ​
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Each story in Sparking the Fluency Shift is preceded by two pages of rehearsal activities. This provides practice with the more difficult spellings, multisyllabic words, unfamiliar vocabulary and complex sentences before they are encountered print. 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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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.
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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.
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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
The Reading Shift - Six 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 six 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. Comprehension is fundamentally a word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence process. At the word level, English has a very reliable spelling-meaning, or grapheme-morpheme relationships. Morphological and vocabulary knowledge are highly correlated. Sight word, or orthographic mapping, is also enhanced by spelling-meaning relationships. On a recent For the Love of Literacy podcast, Linnea Ehri told Bruce Howlett that the spelling, pronunciation and meaning embedded in morphemes are a systematic way that words are stored in sight word memory.
"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 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.
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I'm also the host of For the Love of Literacy podcast that provides a platform for innovative educators and researchers to discuss language-literacy integration - from morphemes and spelling-meaning relationships to sentence construction and reading complex text- Spotify Apple Podcasts
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.​
