The Literacy Cycle
Unifying Reading, Spelling & Sentence Writing

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? Has their interest and engagement waned, so that reading and writing provide them with little pleasure?

While your students have surely learned lots of skills and strategies, they may not understand how these parts work together in a meaningful and unified way. This is where The Literacy Cycle can help by teaching reading, spelling and writing, as an interconnected, meaningful system.

One cycle is complete in an lesson, with each stage of the cycle providing practice reading, spelling and writing every larger and more meaningful groupings of words.

In the first spelling stage, students practice building single syllable words. They discover that they are actually building morphemes with graphemes, spelling patterns.

Next comes the morpheme stage. Every word in English is either a morpheme by itself, like little, read and paper, or composed of a core morpheme, called a base, plus prefixes and suffixes, as needed, like con+struct+ion and un+heal+th+y. Students practice building, spelling and writing words with multiple morphemes, the foundation for word meaning, vocabulary growth and spelling.

Then comes the phrase stage, where students go from focusing on word reading, spelling and meaning to groups of words with greater meaning. Phrases are simply sentence fragments with either a noun or a verb, but not both. They universal building blocks for sentences, playing a major role in comprehension, fluency and expressive written and spoken language.

At the top of the cycle is the sentence stage, where words and phrases come to life, and fluency and grammar become tied to comprehension. Students aren’t just reading and spelling words in sentences but discovering words and phrases work in sentences, a essential writing ability.

However, a Literacy Cycle lesson is only half complete. It is equally important that students understand how to break down and manipulate sentences, phrases, poly-morphemic words and their spellings. As you will see, below, an hour Literacy Cycle lesson is so integrated and well-structured that completing it even with dyslexic and delayed students is, frankly, rewarding for both the student and the teacher.

Lessons that use The Literacy Cycle framework will make sense to even your most delayed student while boosting engagement for all at- or below-grade-level students.

The stages of the Literacy Cycle are rooted in the four major layers of language. These are tightly connected to our unique spelling system, uniting spoken and written language:

Phonology – the arrangement of phonemes to create meaningful spoken words
Morphology – the units of meaning that compose every spoken or written word on the planet
Semantics – the deeper meaning of individual and groups of words, including vocabulary and phrases
Syntax – defines the arrangement of words and phrases that create meaningful sentences
Orthography – the reliable spelling-meaning connections formed between graphemes, letter patterns, and morphemes

Teaching the Literacy Cycle

The Literacy Cycle systematically walks students through each level of language in an integrated manner. The separate parts then fuse into an understandable whole, as does the distinction between spoken and written language.

Reading, spelling and sentence writing become seamlessly interwoven, as they are for proficient students. The Literacy Cycle also enhances the most important function of literacy, meaning.

If you are concerned with word reading and spelling, know that Literacy Cycle builds the spelling, pronunciation and meaning connections critical to decoding and sight word reading, or orthographic mapping.

To find out more about The Literacy Cycle and the connections between written and spoken language listen to my podcast, For the Love of Literacy on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

A Literacy Cycle Lesson

To show how The Literacy Cycle works, I will use activities and the lesson format from Sparking the Reading Shift, which I created for my special education, delayed, and underperforming students.

Sparking the Reading Shift is available in two versions, the 16-lesson Language-Literacy Intervention ($28) for students who have had extended struggles with literacy, as well as the 12-lesson Language-Literacy Enrichment version ($18) for students with reading and writing delays, including those reading at grade-level. This website contains enough information for you to create your own lessons, as well as use both versions without further training.

Spelling - The First and Final Stage

The Literacy Cycle starts and ends at its base—spelling. The first activity provides word chain practice that shows the connections between sound, spelling and meaning.

Students shift one sound, or phoneme, in a word to shift its pronunciation and meaning. They shift the /d/ in send to a /t/, then say, spell and read sent.

At this point, we introduce the concept that all words are composed of one or more morphemes. Students are asked how the shift of one letter and sound changed the meaning of send.

The word list on the right provides practice with two of the most challenging aspects of sound-spelling learning; consonant clusters, like tr and dr, as well as medial vowel shifts. The integrated practice that the Word Shift Challenge provides enables even non-readers to master these difficult patterns after one or two lessons.

There are three more 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

While the spelling stage has students build and manipulate single morpheme / syllable words, the morpheme stage of the Literacy Cycle has them build poly-morphemic words.

Connect the Morpheme Challenge provides practice with the two most powerful morphological teaching tools; morphological word sums and the morphological matrix.

Words sums, lower half, is a powerful activity by itself, preceding matrix activities in Sparking the Reading Shift. Students are given a list of word sums, like in + form and re + form + ed, read the affixes and base word, then write and read the whole word. With a little practice, even nonreaders can read the simple affixes, well as the whole words. Be prepared for an eruption of satisfaction and motivation.

The Morphological Matrix, upper half, affords students the ability to create complex words that are members of a morphological word family from simple affixes and a base. Students draw lines to make words that they know. They then write the word sum, in + form, and then the whole word. The teacher helps them words they didn't find on their own by saying, "What is trans plus form plus er?" Finally, the student reads the list of words--all members of a morphological word family.

Initially, teachers may say, "My students can't read these words." They soon state, "These are the words I want my students to read." When they first use this activity with a struggling student they are invariably surprised by their the students' abilities.

There are three morphological activities in each lesson of Sparking the Reading Shift.

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

– Wagner et al. (2007)

The Phrase Stage

The Phrase Building Challenge and the Building Sentences with Phrases Challenge are used during both the the building up to sentences and the breaking down back to spelling halves of the cycle. The phrase stage has students actively constructing phrases while they practice connecting phrases together to make sentences.

The Phrase Building Challenge students pick words from a list and insert them into a phrase. Then they write and read the resulting phrase. While students learn to make noun, verb and prepositional phrases, no knowledge of grammar is required.

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 at least two of the five phrase activities in each Sparking the Reading Shift lesson.

Phrase and Sentence Building Challenges .png

Phrases, Prosody and Fluency

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

This activity combines repeated reading with prosody practice. Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift ends with a stepped word or phrase reading activity, often called sentence pyramids.

The student slowly reads a line, pausing at each slash mark, which helps build prosodic reading. Students repeat each line until they sound smooth, not 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.

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.

Sentences -- The Top of the Literacy Cycle

You have taken your 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 stage not only boosts sentence writing but teaches students the structure of sentences. This is essential for writing as well as comprehension.

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. Teachers help with vocabulary, as needed. I've never met a student who resisted writing in this manner.

As with all stages, there are two sentence building activities in each lesson. This mix interwoven approach means that each lesson includes twelve brief and varied activities that keep attention and motivation high.

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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

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).

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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Literacy Struggles are 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 literacy.

I spent the next two decades investigating the causes of, and a comprehensive solution for literacy difficulties. While I found partial answers, from phonemic awareness to speech-to-print, my students and I still struggled to read, spell and writing for enjoyment.

Four years ago, I threw out all the lessons I created and started creating activities based on the most recent research findings. I met scores of people, many of whom have been featured on the podcast, who have created innovative literacy solutions.

With their help, I created a set of activities that have finally permitted my students to love reading, and no longer 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 continually add and revise the activities in both versions, which I offer at no cost. Email me at Bruce@ReadingShift.com

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.