Language-Literacy Lessons & Fluency Practices that Excite Delayed and Disinterested Readers

Sparking the Reading Shift is an innovative approach to reading, spelling and sentence writing, based on the universal literacy learning principles that all students on the planet use to learn to read all the incredible forms of written language. The work of six respected literacy researchers (see below) converges on the fact that in all languages, students simultaneously learn how to combine a limited number of sounds, symbols and morphemes - the meaningful core of every word – into thousands of meaningful whole words. They concurrently combine words into a nearly limitless number of phrases and sentences. This accelerates literacy growth as reading, spelling and writing are learned as intertwined abilities.

The key to sparking this reading shift is integrated language-literacy instruction. In English, with its complex sound-spelling relationships, students benefit from understanding the many ways that the major components of spoken language -- sounds / phonemes, morphemes, words and phrases – are represented in written language. Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift takes students on this word construction adventure, moving from sounds to sentences in a continuous process, not as a set of fragmented skills.

By the end of the first lesson, students are reading, spelling and writing sentences using words with multiple syllables and morphemes, including unfamiliar words. This lofty goal is easily reached by proficient seven-year-olds with well-developed language-literacy skills.

Developing these abilities in all students requires transforming them into:

Linguistic Lego Builders – Students who enjoy reading and writing approach words as if they are a set of Lego blocks. They become skilled at snapping together letters, sounds and morphemes to make more complex blocks, including multisyllabic and poly-morphemic words, and phrases. Don’t skip over phrases as they are a powerful bridge between words and sentences. Phrase blocks are easily arranged into all kinds of sentence structures that enhance reading and writing abilities.
Word Detectives – The biggest challenge facing post-primary students is figuring out the pronunciation and meaning of thousands of unfamiliar multisyllabic words. Eight-year-olds who are good word detectives know that these challenging words are composed largely of familiar shorter words, spellings and morphemes. In fact, their fluency increases as words become more complex, helping them teach themselves over 2000 new sight and vocabulary words a year.
Master Meaning Makers understand that comprehension is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process, with the meaning of words only revealed in sentences. Meaning Makers grasp that a word’s spelling provides reliable clues to its meaning, as English graphemes have a very tight connection to morphemes. They know that words have multiple meanings, often shifting from being a noun, a verb or an adjective in a sentence. This is another reason why sentence comprehension is one of the strongest predictors of text comprehension.

Sparking the Reading Shift develops these characteristics in struggling readers, spellers and writers through an A-B-E-C and READ lesson format:

A - Analyze Words for Phonemic-sound, Orthographic-spelling and Morphological-meaningful patterns, or POM – the universal written word pattern
B – Build Words by combining POM patterns in a flexible manner
E - Expand POM Patterns by adding syllables and morphemes
C - Combine simple and complex words into phrases and sentences
READ increasingly longer and more complex word patterns in phrases and sentences – starting in the first lesson

Sparking the Reading Shift teaches these essential literacy patterns in a unified manner, revealing how words work in the English language system. Struggling students soon recognize their fuller linguistic capabilities, shifting their behavior from resistant and avoidant to attentive and engaged.

Who Benefits From Language-Literacy Instruction?

Sparking the Reading Shift is for seven to seventeen-year-olds and is available in a 16-lesson Language-literacy Intervention version for students with protracted decoding, fluency and/or comprehension struggles. The 12-lesson Language-literacy Enrichment version contains the same format and activities but is streamlined for underperforming or disinterested students with moderate fluency and multi-syllable reading difficulties. If you are unsure where to start, we recommend trying the 12-lesson version and watching your students perform at a higher level. The consumable lesson books are sold at cost - $18 or $28.

The limited number of lessons reflects the fact that integrated instruction is more effective and efficient. Do you want to teach reading, spelling and writing, multisyllabic and sight word reading, and morphology, fluency and vocabulary enrichment in separate blocks or in a single unified lesson?

For a ready-to-use sample lesson with activities used in both Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Enrichment and Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Intervention click here.

Sparking the Fluency Shift

Another universal literacy learning principle is the need for fluency development. To move our students past the limitations of decodables and leveled books we created 36 short stories arranged by accurate measures of readability, called Sparking the Fluency Shift ($20). Each story is slightly more difficult than the previous story. This creates small steps that readers can easily master. Students typically move up a level every week or two.

To grow, readers need to be challenged with ever more difficult words to read. To accomplish this without adding stress or frustration, the more challenging words, phrases, and sentences in each story are practiced using a special type of repeated reading, called rehearsal practice. There are two pages of rehearsal practice before each story, leading to improve reading accuracy, rate and expression. This is noticeable to both the student and teacher as the following story is read with ease and understanding.

Sparking the Fluency Shift offers students a path beyond grade-level reading by providing stories that range from beginning first grade to a solid sixth grade level. Students who read at grade level have more in common with struggling readers so we want our students to read like proficient readers do --- who often read two or three grade levels above their actual grade.

The combination of the small steps between each story, increasingly challenging words and rehearsal practice helps ensure that your students will make noticeable fluency and comprehension progress on a weekly basis. Most importantly, reading will become more engaging and enjoyable - and less of an academic task.

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 Universal Theory of Literacy Learning

The six major theories that support integration of the phonemic sound, orthographic spelling and morphological meaning system:

David Share's Universal Combinatorial Model (2025) states that all readers of all written languages on the planet develop literacy by combining a “novice” sound and spelling systems with the “expert” morphological and semantic system. Universally, literacy progresses through three phases, a sub-word letter-and-sound stage, a morpheme / word-level phase which lays the foundation for the meaningful words-in-combination sentence phase.
Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright's Active View of Reading (2022) emphasize that bridging processes including vocabulary, morphology, and “grapho-phonological-semantic flexibility”, pull all the components of literacy together, which are best taught “simultaneously.”

Maryanne Wolf calls the integrated components POSSuM (2021), with the P - phonemic and O - orthographic combining with the meaningful components of language, S - semantically meaningful words, S -syntactic sentences and M - morphemes which Wolf calls the "secret sauce of literacy".

Mark Seidenberg's Connectionist Theory (2016) is based on his literacy triangle with phonology, orthography and semantics forming the corners. After an initial stage, literacy grows by readers implicitly recognizing regularly occuring patterns in words.

John Kirby and Peter Bowers' Morphological Binding Theory (2017) which states that phonology, orthography and semantics are bound together by morphology, the only language element that influences the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of words.

Linnea Ehri's Orthographic Mapping Theory states that for readers to advance from letter-sound decoding to knowing the meaning and pronunciation of a word on sight, a word's spelling, pronunciation and meaning must be "consolidated" in semantic memory.

Sparking the Reading Shift

We created Sparking the Reading Shift primarily to simplify and clarify literacy instruction for our students. However, we wanted to hand both novice and experienced teachers lessons based on current research that enable them to experience success with students starting with their first meeting.

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.

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 or help with lessons. Bruce@ReadingShift.com

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

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 to help their own children.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.