Seven Layers of Literacy Instructional
Morphemes, Phrases and Syntax

There are seven layers of literacy that, when taught in an integrated manner, enable delayed, dyslexic and disinterested students to read and spell multisyllabic words in complex sentences by the end of the first lesson.

This progress is within the reach of virtually all students as each subsequent layer is only slightly more challenging and builds off the previous layers (see graphic). The layers fuse reading, spelling and sentence writing into a single, seamless process that makes sense to both students and teachers alike.

The Seven Layers of Literacy emphasize the three most essential, yet overlooked, layers of literacy instruction:
• Morphemes – the meaningful core of every spoken and written word in all the world’s languages. Every written word is either a unit of meaning by itself, like teach, water and power, or contains a core morpheme, called a base, like in+struct+ion, struct+ure and re+con+struct. Morphemes are not only the primary building blocks of meaning in English, but along with graphemes, are the backbone of our spelling system.

• Phrases are the universal building block of sentences. Phrases are groups of words that contain either a noun or a verb, not both. They span the gap between words and sentences. Phrases amplify the meaning of words – “the young student” has far more meaning than the individual words themselves.
• Syntax – defines how words, morphemes and phrases are arranged to form coherent and meaningful sentences. Not just an abstract grammatical term, syntax is an essential and powerful factor in reading comprehension and written expression.

These three components form the framework for the Seven Layers of Literacy, creating a broad foundation for reading, spelling and writing success. They empower word level skills, while the pathway to comprehension, as well as reading and writing enjoyment.

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"Meaning making is the central goal of reading and writing - in the former the aim is to derive meaning, while in the latter it is to communicate meaning." Meghan Hicks, Australian Educator and Instructional Designer.

The Seven Layer of Literacy also have a noticeable effect on student engagement. Students who have long-struggled with decoding and spelling simple words soon find that they can read and spell poly-morphemic words in multi-phrase sentences. The result is a much-needed boost in confidence and interest in literacy instruction, which in turn provides much-needed motivation for both students and their teachers.

Seven Instructional Shifts

In Sparking the Reading Shift, brief intervention and enrichment lesson books, each of the Seven Levels of Literacy is enhanced by an instructional shift. While the seven layers define the “what” of instruction, the seven instructional shifts change the pedagogy, the “how” of learning.

The instructional shifts refocus teaching from sounds and symbols, word pronouncing and syllables, to reading and spelling words with morphemes, and writing and comprehended sentences with phrases.

This powerful combination means that far fewer lessons are needed to achieve competency. Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Enrichment contains only 12 lessons, while Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Intervention has only 16 lessons.

The Literacy Cycle Lesson Plan

The Seven Layers of Literacy

First, let’s look at the seven layers of literacy, and then I use activities from Sparking the Reading Shift to explain the seven instructional shifts. You will see how easy it is to create your own activities and integrate them into your existing literacy instruction. I’ll use light, one of hundreds of words in a lesson, as an example:

Layer One -- Single Word Reading & Spelling

Instructional Shift -- – students learn the relationships between the three word forms, graphemes (l – igh -t), morphemes (light) and phonemes /l/ /ai/ /t/. They learn to flex the pronunciation of words as they grow longer. Light to lightning /l/ /ai/ /n/ /ə/ /ng/.

Linguistic Challenge -- figure out how phoneme and grapheme shifts create new, meaningful words - morphemes. .

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.

There are two addition sound-spelling-meaning activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

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

Layer Two - Identifying Base Morphemes

Instructional Shift -- While many methods delay instruction on multi-syllable words, Students learn to identify morphemes in ploy-morphemic words in the first lesson. They learn that some two-syllable words are actually single morphemes, like water, power and table. All longer words in English are composed of a base morpheme plus prefixes and suffixes, as needed.

Linguistic Challenge -- Identify base morphemes and affixes in words

In this challenge students find a base morpheme and circle it. Next, the spell the whole word. When they have written all the words they then read them.

Layer Three - Multi-Morpheme Words

Instructional Shift -- Next, students learn how all longer words are built—by combining a core morpheme, called a base, with prefixes and suffixes, as needed:

Linguistic Challenge -- figure out how to combine prefixes and suffixes with base morphemes to create poly-morphemic words.

Morphological Word Sums

Students first read the base word, play, then spell and write it, "p-l-ay plus s is rewritten as p-l-ay-s, plays." This is a very effect way of storing word in memory.

The lower activity, Morphological Matrix, creates a morphological word family. Students first read the affixes and the base, then they find words that they know. They draw lines to connect the morphemes. They then write the word sum, re+ act + ing , and then write the whole word as they spell it. If the student gets stuck, the teacher asks, "What is re plus act plus ive?"

There are four 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)

Layer Four
Natural Word Pairs & Three Word Phrases

The Instructional Shift - These layers are often skipped, either to focus intensely on single words or in a rush to get to sentences.

The Linguistic Challenge - Figure out two word natural pairs like light blue, bright light, light sleeper, light year,

or three word phrases to amplify the meaning of words.

If the student can't initially read the words, the teacher reads them. Then the student reads the words while searching for phrases. This reasoning, reading, spelling and rereading process solidifies the phrases in memory.

Layer Five
Reading and Writing Three Phrase Sentences

Instructional Shift -- Next, students learn how all longer words are built—by combining a core morpheme, called a base, with prefixes and suffixes, as needed:

Linguistic Challenge -- figure out how to combine prefixes and suffixes with base morphemes to create poly-morphemic words.

Morphological Word Sums

Students first read the base word, play, then spell and write it, "p-l-ay plus s is rewritten as p-l-ay-s, plays." This is a very effect way of storing word in memory.

There are four 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)

Layer Six
Reading & Writing Three Word Sentences

The Instructional Shift - Sentence reading and writing is integrated into each and every lesson.

The Linguistic Challenge - Create three phrase sentences of your choice.

Resistance to writing is greatly reduced when sentence writing made part of a layer instruction. Students also enjoy having a voice in what they write.

Layer Seven
Multicomponent Fluency Development

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 Reading 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 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

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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 key to student success is treating reading, spelling and sentence writing as a seamless process. Expectations are kept high, but attainable. When I created 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?" Then I made each stage in the Literacy Cycle only slightly more difficult. We went at a pace that suited each student. They often grew excited when they discovered the secrets behind spelling, word meaning and sentence composition and comprehension.

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 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 ($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.

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).