Seven Layers of Literacy
Did you know that reading, spelling, and sentence-writing difficulties have a common origin? Not only do they share overlapping skills and abilities, but they also rely on the same language processes. In fact, recent research clearly demonstrates the benefits of teaching these critical components of literacy as a single, interconnected ability rather than as isolated skills.
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When reading, spelling, and sentence-writing instruction are unified, students—including those with limited decoding and spelling abilities—can successfully read multisyllabic words, spell difficult vocabulary words, and write complex sentences by the end of the first lesson.
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This isn’t magic. Spelling words with multiple meaningful parts (morphemes) boosts decoding more effectively than sound-symbol-syllable instruction. Sentence reading and writing are the language skills that most strongly influence word recognition, vocabulary growth, fluency, & text comprehension. As students write increasingly complex sentences, their reading comprehension also improves--the primary goals of literacy instruction
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This higher level of literacy instruction is critical because written language is far more complex than conversational language. Just look at how language complexity increases from the fairy tales we read to six-year-olds to a seven-year-old’s first chapter book, an eight-year-old’s narrative story, a nine-year-old’s novel, and a ten-year-old’s science text.
Our students’ writing should grow in much the same way.
I’m Bruce Howlett, host of the For the Love of Literacy podcast. I’ve created easy-to-use, high-quality literacy and math tools for two decades. I wanted my dyslexic, delayed, and simply disengaged students to have access to these groundbreaking innovations. So, I created The Seven Layers of Literacy Lesson Plan for my students six-to-sixteen years of age.
The lesson plan unifies reading, spelling, and sentence writing in a structured, step-by-step sequence. Each layer introduces a progressively more complex literacy concept, moving from words to phrases to sentences. Each new concept building on the previous one. Every activity is presented as a word or sentence puzzle for students to solve. This process of figuring things out—called desirable difficulty—helps students not only learn language concepts but also apply them by engaging their reasoning and language skills. The activities are carefully scaffolded to support success, which in turn motivates students who may otherwise resist or avoid instruction. See examples of each layer, below.
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Layer 1 – Build Progressively Longer Words: a → an → and → band → brand → brands
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Layer 2 – Identify Morphemes - Building Blocks of Words – All English words combinations of morphemes: respectful spectator disrespect
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Layer 3 – Build Complex Words with Multiple Morphemes: con + struct + ion → construction
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Layer 4 – Combine Words into Phrases: ice + cream → ice cream the + young + student → the young student
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Layer 5 -- Sequence Phrases into Rich Sentences: The student → The young friendly student (noun phrase)
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Layer 6 – Write and Understand Complex Sentences: The young student + ate ice cream + in the park.
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Layer 7 – Build Reading & Writing Fluency in Unison- Research shows that these abilities are best developed together.
I consolidated the lessons I created into a 16-lesson intervention and a 12-lesson enrichment program called Sparking the Reading Shift ($20–$32). Each lesson follows the Seven Layers of Literacy Lesson Plan, so students read, spell and write up to 400 words per lesson. A sample lesson, below, demonstrates each layer using activities from Sparking the Reading Shift. "How to get started" information is provided, below.​
Complex Text Reading Practice
Greater complexity also plays a role in innovative reading fluency and comprehension practice. Elfrieda Hiebert’s Teaching Words and How They Work and Timothy Shanahan’s Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives both demonstrate the importance of complex-text practice for literacy growth. Specifically, the greatest growth in comprehension and engagement comes from text that contain challenging words, sentences and vocabulary.
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Simply put, decodable and leveled texts do not provide the challenging reading experiences students need to comprehend and, more importantly, learn to enjoy complex and engaging books.
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To provide my students with enriched reading practice, I created Sparking the Fluency Shift, ($24) a collection of 36 short stories, each preceded by rehearsal practice, activities that pre-teach the more challenging words, vocabulary and sentence structures. This allows students to read the stories with far greater accuracy, fluency, comprehension and enjoyment. Comprehension scores typically improve by a grade level or more over a cold reading of the same material. See teaching instructions, below.
Layer One
Build Progressively Longer Words
Word Chains -Manipulating graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds) in linked words is more powerful than learning them in isolation. Students who struggle with phonics will find success with word building activities.
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​The Challenge - figure out how sound, spelling and meaning work together to create new words that are easy to read accurately and with understanding. .
The Method -- Word chain - The student shift a word's spelling and pronunciation to create a new and longer or shorter word. All words are both pronounced and spelled.
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Strengthens: decoding, segmentation and blending, spelling and word recognition.
Sparking the Reading Shift contains two additional word recognition activities.
“Reading words and spelling words are two sides of a coin.” - Linnea Ehri
Layer Two
Identify Morphemes - Building Blocks of Words
Every word in all the world's languages is either a morpheme by itself -- teach, power, water -- or has a core morpheme, call a base -- respectful, inspection.
Breading a word into its prefixes, suffixes and base helps reveal its spelling and meaning.
The Challenge - figure out how to identify the base morpheme as well as common prefixes and suffixes. Discover how all longer English words are are constructed. .
​The Method - Morphological Analysis - Circle the prefixes and suffixes, revealing the base word. They write the base, spell each word as a "word sum" and use the word in a sentence. ​​
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Strengthens: Decoding, spelling, multisyllabic word reading, sentence writing and vocabulary.
Layer Three
Build Complex Words with Multiple Morphemes
All complex words in English are composed of a base morpheme with suffixes and prefixes added, as needed. While some methods wait months or years to introduce multisyllabic words, five-year-olds can learn to spell and read words with multiple morphemes using these methods.
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​The Linguistic Challenge -- figure out how to combine prefixes and suffixes with base morphemes to build complex words.
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Morphological Word Sums
Students read and then rewrite word sums, words divided into morphemes, as whole words. The words are grouped into morphological word families.
Morphological Matrix
Students link suffixes and prefixes to a base word, write the word as a word sum and then as a whole word.
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Strengthens: Decoding, spelling, multisyllabic word reading and vocabulary
​There are five 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
Combine Words into Phrases
The Linguistic Challenge: Now that students have a handle on single words it's time to combine them into phrases.
Two Word Natural Pairs (Collocations)
Students must figure out which two word combinations make sense.
Three Word Phrase Building
Next, students make phrases, the building blocks of sentences. Students enjoy this challenge task as it respects their cognitive & language abilities.
Strengthens: Decoding, word recognition, language abilities, spelling, writing and vocabulary
Layer Five
Sequence Phrases into Rich Sentences
Syntax, which governs the arrangement of words and phrases in sentences, is the layer of language that most influences comprehension and fluency. Understanding how complex sentences are constructed is essential to written expression.
​Linguistic Challenge -- figure out the correct order of phrases to make a meaningful sentence. This activity is often used to assess sentence comprehension.
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Students figure out how to combine phrases into meaningful sentences. Then they write the phrases in sentence (syntactic) order.
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Strengthens: Spelling, linguistic reasoning, sentence writing and comprehension. ​There are 5 phrase activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.
Layer Six
Write & Understand Complex Sentences
This is the goal of literacy instruction. Now that students have practiced building words with morphemes and sentences with phrases they are ready to construct and understand complex sentences.
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The Linguistic Challenge
Find the Hidden Meaning Challenge has students identify the meaning of phrases in a sentence, a powerful way of building comprehension.
The Build a Better Sentence Challenge is a paraphrasing activity, where students figure out how to swap phrases to change the meaning of a sentence. This deeper understanding of sentences is strongly correlated with text comprehension.
Strengthens: Spelling, reading and writing fluency, sentence writing and comprehension.
Layer Seven
Build Reading & Writing Fluency in Unison
Recent research shows that reading and writing fluency are overlapping skills and are best developed together. Reading fluency, above a beginning level, is heavily influenced by prosody - the ability to reading phrases with expression which enhances meaning.
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The Linguistic Challenge - Read, spell and write sentence fluently.
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Sentence Matrix Challenge - Students combine phrases into sentences of their choosing. Quick writes like this are powerful way of improving writing.
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Slow and Smooth Reading Challenge - The last activity in each lesson is this challenge. Ironically, fluent meaningful reading develops by slowing students down and reading in phrases, with expression. ​​​​
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Strengthens: Spelling, fluency, sentence writing and comprehension, as well as greater motivation and engagement.
Sparking the Reading Shift
As you have seen, Sparking the Reading Shift builds reading, spelling, sentence writing, and comprehension skills in a logical and sensible manner.
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It is easy for educators, new teachers, and parents to use without training.
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Each page contains a ready-to-use word or sentence activity, complete with word lists and brief instructions.
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A 30-minute session once or twice a week is enough to produce noticeable growth quickly. There is no need to follow a fixed schedule, as spreading a lesson over a week or so also produces satisfactory results.
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This is a consumable workbook in which students continually read, spell, and write words, phrases, and sentences directly in the book.
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Language-Literacy Intervention ($32) contains 16 one-hour lessons. It begins with simpler words and progresses at a slower pace. It is widely used with students aged seven to seventeen who require extended support from a special education or reading teacher. 148 pages
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Language-Literacy Enrichment ($20) is designed for students aged 6 to 60 who experience reading fluency, spelling, and/or sentence-writing difficulties, including students who read at grade level but do not enjoy reading.
If you are unsure which program to choose, email Bruce@ReadingShift.com or start with the Enrichment program. 130 pages
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Sparking the Reading Shift is widely used with approaches as different as Orton-Gillingham and Balanced Literacy.
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Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Enrichment and Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Intervention both use the same activities and follow the Seven Layers of Literacy Lesson Plan.
​​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 the 120-to-150-page books when choosing between the PDF and print version. US Priority Mail is only about $8. Email me with questions. Bruce@ReadingShift.com.
​Enhanced Fluency and Comprehension Practice
Sparking the Fluency Shift
Sparking the Fluency Shift ($24) is a collection of 36 one-page stories that grow in complexity and length. The stories start at a basic first grade (~6 y/o) level and end at a solid sixth grade level. This gives students the opportunity to advance to above-grade level material, as all their proficient peers do.
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Each grade level contains up to eight stories. Each story is slightly but noticeably more difficult than the previous one. This allows students to confidently move up book levels frequently, providing much-needed motivation for students and teachers alike.
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The stories are preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice featuring pre-reading fluency and comprehension-boosting exercises. Students practice reading more difficult spellings, longer words, unfamiliar vocabulary, and complex phrases and sentences before encountering them in the stories.
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​​ The topics and content of the stories were chosen by my very opinionated preteen and teenage students. The topics range from making friends and resolving conflicts to fantasy stories involving time travel.
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Sparking the Fluency Shift includes two pages of teaching suggestions. However, parents and new teachers consistently report that they can begin using the rehearsal activities and stories immediately and with confidence.​​
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For a free, three-story sample complete with rehearsal practice activities at the 1st, 3rd and 5th grade levels, click here ​
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