Lessons & Reading Practice
that Turn Fragmented Reading Instruction
into Integrated Language-Literacy Development

We’d like to offer you a refreshing perspective on teaching reading and lessons based on universal literacy learning principles supported by six current theories of literacy development. The key principle holds that all students on the planet learn to read all the diverse forms of written language by understanding that both written and spoken language are sequential. Simply, different sound, spelling and meaning combinations form every word that you read or spell, and every sentence that you read or write.

Twelve foundational sequences combine the Big Four Components of spoken language – sounds (phonemes), the meaningful parts of words (morphemes), whole words (semantics) and sentences (syntax) -- with written language (orthography). These components are best developed in an integrating manner using twelve overlapping and mutually reinforcing sequences. This approach results in noticeable improvement in both basic reading skills as well as promoting continuous sight word, spelling, fluency and comprehension growth.

The lessons we offer also respect these universal principles of literacy learning:

Language and literacy development are inseparable, with the level of growth of the Big Four and closely related vocabulary knowledge largely predicting and determining literacy progress.
The more knowledge a reader has about a word, the easier it is to read and spell meaningfully.
Language-literacy success is rooted in the ability to analyze sequences using segmentation and chunking skills and to synthesize words using sound blending, word building and sentence construction.

To develop language-literacy in an integrated manner - not as a checklist of individual skills - we created Sparking the Reading Shift for our special ed and at-or-below grade-level students, ages seven-to-seventeen. Each of the twelve or sixteen Reading Shift lessons develops the twelve sequences by merging The Big Four with the many ways they are represented in print. By the end of the first lesson our students are reading, spelling and writing words with multiple syllables and morphemes at the sentences level. BTW, the lessons require no prep or training to teach.

To integrate these critical language-literacy abilities with connected text our students practice reading using Sparking the Fluency Shift, a book of 36 engaging short stories of ever-increasing difficulty. Before reading each story students develop fluency and understanding of the more challenging words and sentences using a special type of repeated reading, called rehearsal practice. They then read the stories without hesitation and soon notice how easy and enjoyable reading even challenging text can be. No guarantees that they will drop their phones for books!

There are 12 core sequences developed in Sparking the Reading Shift, which show students how to actively:

Build and Analyze Simple Word Sequences:

Build Words from POM Parts by combining Phonemic sounds, Orthographic letters and Morphological meaningful word parts.
Analyze POM Patterns to reveal the subtle differences in words that trip up readers – slip-slap brand-bland love-live gave-give
Word Chains that develop the ability to manipulate the sound, spelling and meaning sequences in words.
Analyze and Read Onset-rime Patterns to step up from single letter decoding – ip-rip-ip-trip-ip-strip

Build and Analyze Longer Word Sequences – Semantics:

Syllable Sequencing of multisyllabic words using linguistic knowledge – pan – ex – sion → expansion
Syllable/Morpheme Pattern Awareness – find common word parts in sets of words:
inclusive – exclusive – included – expensive – explosive – excluded -- imploded -- reclusive
Morphological Word Sums to analyze the structure of longer words – reaction → re + act + ion
Morphological Matrixes – build words from tables of prefixes, suffixes and base words
Morphological Word Families – discover the tight links between spellings and morphemes, and the shifting sound and meaning patterns in poly-morphemic words – sign, signature, resign, re-sign, assignment, design, designate

Sequence Words into Sentences- Syntax:

Combine Words into Sentences – they large treehouse a built → they built a large treehouse
Combine Phrases into Sentences – in the brisk wind – swayed – the tall trees → The tall trees swayed in the brisk wind
Sentence Pyramid Reading – the - the boy - the boy caught - the boy caught the ball

These sequencing activities are incorporated into every lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift. The activities are structured so even our students with multiple cognitive, speech and language, reading and motivational issues are happily reading and writing sentences that contain multisyllabic words by the end of the first lesson.

Understanding the Needs of Students and Teachers

I’m Bruce Howlett, Reading Shift and Fluency Shift project coordinator, special education teacher and former biological science researcher. I struggled with reading fluency, spelling longer words and putting together oral and written sentences well into adulthood. Wanting to better understand the source of my struggles, I started teaching science and special education to emotionally disturbed teens. I soon learned that their literacy struggles paralleled mine. Dissatisfied with the varied methods that the school was using, I deployed my research skills to create lessons based on current research, not decades-old traditions.

At age 45, I began creating phonemically based reading lessons with a speech therapist. After a few weeks. I noticed marked improvements in reading fluency. However, reading, spelling & writing longer words and sentences could be challenging.

After twenty years of lesson development I still felt that my students and I could do better. So, three years ago, I scraped all my lessons and started anew, working backwards from current research. This practice is common in scientific research when existing knowledge fails to provide answers to long-term problems. Literacy instruction clearly has this type of problem.

I quickly discovered, hidden in plain sight, fresh research and methods based on integrated language-literacy development. It became clear that this knowledge not only produced basic reading skills but also extended literacy abilities all the way to sentence construction and comprehension. The common theme of this research is that the easiest and most meaningful way to develop literacy is to simultaneously teach all the major components of literacy.

Researchers that Supports Integrated Language-literacy Development

Researchers use different terms to describe unified language sequencing but converge on the need for integration:

David Share using combining. His Universal Combinatorial Model (2025) states that all readers of all written languages on the planet develop literacy “combinatorally” by combining the “novice” P + O phonological level and the “expert” morphological level, the understanding that all words are composed of meaningful sequences.
Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright, use bridge building in their Active View of Reading (2022). The bridging components including vocabulary, morphology, and “grapho-phonological-semantic flexibility”, which Duke says should be taught “simultaneously.”
Maryanne Wolf calls the integration POSSuM (2021), which starts with the P and O and adds the meaningful components of language - morphemes, semantically meaningful words and syntactically constructed sentences. For Wolf, decoding, fluency and “deep reading” all spring from POSSuM.
Mark Seidenberg calls it connecting in his Connectionist Theory (2016). The vast majority of words we read are learned “statistically,” by recognizing recurring phonological, orthographic and semantic patterns. Words don’t exist in isolation so “the performance on any given word is affected by knowledge of other words.”
John Kirby and Peter Bowers call it binding in their Morphological Binding Theory (2017) which states that phonology, orthography and semantics are bound together by morphology, the only language element that affects the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of words.
Linnea Ehri refers to bonding in her Orthographic Mapping Theory. The final phase before words are read from memory without decoding, involves bonded or consolidated together the P and O with longer chunks of letters, especially syllables and morphemes.

Share’s universal model includes another key idea about literacy. Readers across the planet pass through two stages, a “novice” stage of “phonological transparency” where words are pronounced automatically.

Readers who experience long-term literacy success develop an “expert” level of “morphological transparency,” where meaning of words arises effortlessly. English has the least reliable sound-to-spelling correspondences of any alphabetic language which is why places much importance on highly reliable spelling-to-morpheme connections. Sparking the Reading Shift develops both levels of transparency, leading to a deeper understanding of the language-literacy system.

Word Detectives and Master Meaning Makers

We want our students to develop the extended language-literacy skills that define precocious readers. So, both Reading Shift and Fluency Shift help students become Word Detectives and Master Meaning Makers:

Word Detectives -- Words with multiple morphemes and syllables become puzzles filled with POM + S clues that help readers to uncover pronunciations and meanings. Readers confront thousands of unfamiliar words each year, and up to 150,000 unfamiliar words through secondary school. Students with solid word solving skills grow more fluent as words become more complex and rarer. Sparking the Reading Shift uses an A-B-E-C lesson format to help with word detection. Readers learn to: A- Analyze, B- Build, E-Expand and C- Combine simple and complex words accurately and effortlessly.

Master Meaning Makers dive below the superficial spelling of words to uncover meaning. They know how to hunt for meaning by finding morphemes and semantic connections between words. They look for meaning in sentences where it is fully revealed. Reading a word like brush is just the beginning of meaning making. They don’t stop until they understand sentence like this: “She had a brush with death while brushing her wind-brushed hair with a black brush as a friend brushed here off.” Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift builds the connections between morphemes, word meaning, phrase and sentences comprehension -- a strong indicator of text comprehension.

Sparking the Reading Shift

We created Sparking the Reading Shift primarily to simplify and clarify literacy instruction for students. However, we wanted to hand both novice and experienced teachers lessons based on current research that enables them to experience success with students starting with their first meeting. We spent years refining the lessons so that educators in our often stressful profession could immediately use Reading Shift and Fluency Shift without added prep time or training. We are always available to answer questions and respond to comments. Email me directly Bruce@ReadingShift.com

Sparking the Reading Shift comes in two versions:
Language-literacy Intervention ($28) contains 170 page, 16 one-hour lessons. Each page is a ready-to-use word sequencing 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.
See a sample lesson below or download a ready-to-use lesson here.

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. See a sample lesson or download the same ready-to-use lesson here.

Sparking the Fluency Shift

Sparking the Fluency Shift ($20) - 36 short stories of 150 to 400 words in length arranged by accurate measures of readability. Before students read each story they develop fluency with the more challenging words, phrases, and sentences using rehearsal practice. Students then read the story with greater ease and enjoyment, not as an academic task.

The goal of Fluency Shift is for students to read above grade level, as proficient readers do, so the stories range from beginning first grade (~6 y/o) to sixth grade (~11 y/o). With up to eight levels per grade students typically move up levels every week or two. producing a much-needed sense of progress.

Download three stories at a first, third and sixth grade level, complete with rehearsal activities here.

While Sparking the Fluency Shift directly supports Sparking the Reading Shift the book is widely used by all underperforming readers. No training is required. Parents love it as do teachers who frequently use Fluency Shift with their own children.

Start Developing Language-Literacy Tomorow

Both Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift are available in PDF for immediate download or in print, by mail (scroll right below).

Consider your printing costs for the 120-to-170-page books when choosing between the PDF and print version.
US Priority Mail is only about $8.

Thank you for your interest in these exciting developments in literacy instruction.

Shop

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.