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 disengaged, failing to develop a fascination with words and a love of literacy?

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.

As the graphic shows, start by showing your students that sentences are composed of phrases, a universal building block. Phrases also form simple bridges between words and sentences. Then your students will paraphrase the phrases into simpler words, which builds vocabulary and comprehension.

Next, show them how the words are composed of morphemes, the minimal unit of meaning. Every word in all the world's languages is either a morpheme by itself, like little or teach, or is constructed by adding prefixes and suffixes to a core morpheme, called a base, like con + struct + ion or re + teach + ing.

Finally, so them the reliable spelling-meaning relationship between graphemes and morphemes. With a deeper understanding of how sentences and words are structured, phoneme-grapheme patterns are easily learned as part of a larger and meaningful language-literacy system.

This process shows students the interconnections between the components of the writing system in a clear and sensible manner. They will learn to read, spell and write sentences in a seamless manner, not as isolated parts. This saves hours each week.

Best of all, by the end of a sentence-first lesson your students will be reading and spelling words with multiple syllables and morphemes in multi-phrase sentences.

Fluency and comprehension instruction are embedded in a sentence-first approach:

sentence comprehension largely determines text level comprehension
morphological knowledge and vocabulary knowledge are tightly linked.
spelling-meaning, or grapheme-morpheme relationships end word memorization while eliminating irregular or heart words.

You'll also help your students overcome the key barriers to reading, spelling and writing: "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)

Best of all, by spending eight minutes reading this website you'll understand how to teach in this straightforward manner. B

My goal is to provide teachers and parents with methods and activities that they can immediately use to refine foundational skills as well as enhance text reading abilities. Your students will make noticeable progress after the first lesson and become more motivated and engaged.

I will show you how to build activities that easily improve reading, spelling and writing, as well as how to convert these activities into pre-reading scaffolds using a simple fluency and comprehension methods called rehearsal practice. This method allows below grade level students to read at or above grade level text.

Educators are also looking for easily implemented methods that align with current research and don't require training. I converted these sentence-first activities into a 16-lesson program for dyslexic and special education students, called Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Intervention. I also created a version for students with less prolonged reading, spelling and writing difficulties, including students reading at grade level, called Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Enrichment

I also created for my students Sparking the Fluency Shift as an alternative to decodable and leveled books. Fluency Shift contains 36 short stories ranging from a basic first grade level to a solid six grade level, offering students to progress to above grade level reading--where their more proficient peers perform. Each story is preceded by rehearsal activities that provides practice with the more difficult words, vocabulary and sentences before they are encountered in the text. Students go on to read with greater fluency and comprehension, and with fewer corrections.

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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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, is the word level meaningful layer.

These three layers can also form the biggest barriers to text comprehension, which are:

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 activity, with varying levels of words, are in each lesson in both versions of Sparking the Reading Shift.

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

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.

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

– Wagner et al. (2007)

Building Word Recognition Skills

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.

“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

Reading Practice That Builds Fluency and Comprehension Abilities

As you have seen, the activities in Sparking the Reading Shift are easily transformed into scaffolds that give below-grade-level readers immediate access to grade-level text. I wanted to provide my students with reading practice that provided the same advantage, so I created Sparking the Fluency Shift, a series of 36 stories, each preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice.

These prereading fluency and comprehension activities provide practice the more difficult words and sentences in each story before they are encountered in the stories. Students then go on to read the stories with greater fluency, accuracy and comprehension—and with fewer corrections—when compared to a cold reading of the text.

In his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Timothy Shanahan shows that the greatest growth in comprehension and reading engagement comes from text that contains challenging words, sentences and vocabulary, not from text fails to stretch a student linguistically. Shanahan also promotes the use of rehearsal practice, which he says raises fluency and comprehension abilities by over a grade level, while significantly expanding vocabulary knowledge.

Sparking the Fluency Shift

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 stories range from a beginning first grade level to a solid sixth grade level. This provides a path to above grade-level reading, a level typically achieved by fluent readers.

There are six to eight stories per grade level, which allows readers to advance on almost a weekly basis. This provides much-needed and noticeable progress that is highly motivating for both the student and the teacher.

The topics and the content for the stories were chosen by my very judgmental preteen and teenage students. he 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).

Consider your printing costs for the120-to-150-page books when choosing between the PDF and print version.
US Priority Mail is only about $8.

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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.