Advertise on podcast: For The Love Of Literacy

Why doesn’t sounding out a word always tell us how to spell it? Bruce Howlett welcomes speech-language pathologist and literacy specialist Anya Maloney to explore common misconceptions about the alphabetic principle and how English spelling works. Anya explains how borrowing, pronunciation changes, and other historical influences shaped a system that represents pronunciation, meaning, and word history. Through examples of unexpected spellings and expansive word families, she shows how etymology can help students understand spelling, connect related words, and deepen their vocabulary. The conversation offers educators a fuller picture of English spelling and accessible ways to bring word history into literacy instruction. Anya’s website: https://languagelearninglink.com/ SWIRV FB page:  https://www.facebook.com/share/19hwRYQN1g/?mibextid=wwXIfr  The History of English podcast: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ Apple Podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-english-podcast/id538608536

England's phonics‑first mandates struggle to engage all learners, leaving about a third of students with limited reading abilities—even when they have received years of instruction. The mandates miss opportunities to build vocabulary, comprehension and curiosity, essential literacy skills.  Meet a team of educators working to enrich instruction with Structured Word Inquiry, which blends morphology and spelling. This approach blends deep inquiry into words, offering a meaning‑rich alternative to traditional spelling instruction.  Students learn that English spelling is a logical system to explore rather than a code that fails to account for all spellings. Bullet points: England’s phonics‑first system—driven by Ofsted pressure, scripted SSP lessons, and high‑stakes checks—creates a bottleneck where many children stall, repeat ineffective drills, and miss out on broader reading development.Structured Word Inquiry offers a scientific, meaning‑centered alternative that integrates morphology, etymology, and phonology, turning word study into investigation rather than rote decoding.SWI boosts engagement, supports dyslexic and neurodivergent learners, and re‑energizes the teaching of early reading and spelling by replacing rigid scripts with flexible, evidence‑based tools like word sums, matrices, and word families.Policy shifts and grassroots UK advocacy are opening space for richer instruction, with accessible entry points—such as simple word sums and weekly SWI drop‑ins—helping teachers begin immediately. Contacts:  Andrea Dalland: Tanya Watt: , Jo Johnson Language and Literacy Support: [email protected]. Susannah Thorne: Link for the UK SWI Cohort FB group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/1401185435025834/ The FB group for the Drop-In: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1536607167483053/ The International Drop-In meets every Thursday at 12:30pm London time.  The Zoom link is available in the FB group

Do you want to get excited about teaching words, vocabulary, spelling, and writing instruction? Do you want to see your students embrace these subjects as enriching and empowering abilities — not just another academic task? Sean Morrissey points the way with The Word Mapping Project, a series of clear, consistent 35-minute lessons that integrate these language and literacy abilities using cognitive learning principles that make instruction stick.  Sean, a school psychologist who became a classroom teacher, discusses the excitement that comes from seeing diverse groups of students embrace reading, spelling, vocabulary, and writing tasks they once avoided. Sean makes integrating this innovative and enriching approach simple enough all teachers to embrace, including classroom and content area teachers, EL and intervention specialists, SLPs and tutors.     Website: www.wordmappingproject.com X handle: https://x.com/smorrisey   @smorrisey Substack: https://seanmorrisey.substack.com/

Do your students struggle to stay focused, avoid distractions, begin and complete assignments, or remember directions? Would you like to help them resist impulses, switch between tasks, and manage their thoughts and behaviors? Speech-Language Pathologist Beth Coppic Gunshor discusses how these executive function (EF) skills play out when working with students, turning abstract concepts into practical activities that build academic and life-defining skills. Learn how Beth uses self-talk, whiteboard clocks, and flashlights to help her students remember past events so they can visualize the future to decide what action to take right now. Resources mentioned during For the Love of Literacy’s podcast on literacy and executive function with Beth Coppoc Gunshor Cognitive Connections: Sarah Ward and Kristin Jacobson Video about working clock, starting at 30 minutes Tera Sumpter: Seeds of Learning Gretchen Wegner: Anti-Boring Learning Lab Michael Mcleod: GrowNow ADHD Video of Dimensional Change Card Sort Test Center on the Developing Child: Building the Brain’s “Air Traffic Control” System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function

“If only we, as dyslexics, had learned how the English writing system works—from words to sentences—when we were in elementary school! Maybe we wouldn’t have struggled with language and literacy.”  For decades, non-dyslexic individuals have been telling dyslexics how they learn, often focusing strictly on early literacy skills. This offers a very limited view of dyslexia. Listen to two adult dyslexics, literacy instructor Marie Foley and For the Love of Literacy host Bruce Howlett, discuss their decades-long struggle with reading comprehension, complex word spelling, and written expression. Your understanding of dyslexia will be transformed. In this episode, Bruce hands over hosting duties to linguist Sara Lee. Sara works with Marie and Bruce on grammar and syntax, taking them beneath the surface of words and sentences while exploring new learning methods. Today, Marie and Bruce are utterly fascinated by language and its many connections to literacy. Best of all, written and spoken English finally make sense!

If your students read accurately but with limited fluency, comprehension or interest then Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert’s talk will be of great benefit. Freddy summarizes her decades of research, showing how vocabulary depth and richness are key components of reading comprehension and written expression.   Dr. Hiebert has created two essential materials: Teaching Words and How They Work, and TextProject.Org. Teaching Words centers literacy instruction on vocabulary development and how children learn, understand and read complex words. She notes that most students read with high accuracy, but with limited fluency and vocabulary depth.   To address this widespread problem, Freddy’s TextProject.org provides free resources for teaching vocabulary development and semantics, or word meaning. The site includes ready-to-use word webs, Exceptional Expressions and Super Synonyms as well as reading material for emerging readers, content areas and Teen Reads.   The subtitle of Teaching Words is Small Changes for Big Vocabulary Results. Dr. Hiebert talks about the importance of small changes, not wholesale shifts, for improving instruction.  TextProject.org

Many students who struggle with literacy also struggle with math.  Understanding the number system requires engaging linguistic, cognitive, executive functions and conceptual understanding -- just like literacy. Meaning is as important to math learning as it does in literacy. Math that is taught as a series of isolated procedures, facts and “islands of knowledge” disconnected from meaning will make little sense - just as it does with reading. Math makes sense when students learn the structure of math, including its syntax and vocabulary, and approach it as a coherent system. This also diminishes math anxiety.     Bruce Howlett’s Seven Layers of Literacy Approach:  ReadingShift.com  Megan Hicks: [email protected]  The Sentence Studio www.scienceofthesentence.com Jen Petrich:  Literacy Dr website:  https://www.theliteracydr.com·         D.O.T.S. course info and registration:   https://www.theliteracydr.com/pd/dots·         Wednesdays with Literacy Dr (free drop-in) info and registration: https://www.theliteracydr.com/drop-in·         Literacy Dr videos https://www.theliteracydr.com/videos·         List of Resources for Further Learning

Why do so many students continue to struggle with spelling and writing even after years of phonics instruction? In this episode, Sarah Mitchell explores the missing layer between decoding instruction and deeper literacy transfer: integrated word study. Drawing on research, classroom experience and practical teaching examples, Sarah explains how word-building using a six-layer “word study map” that develops sounds, meaning, spellings, connections, morphemes and sentences in the same lesson. The more connections a child has with a word the easier it is to recognize, comprehend and use it while writing. The conversation explores the implementation gap many teachers experience — understanding the theory but still feeling unsure how to apply it during real lessons — and introduces practical ways to make literacy instruction more connected, efficient and meaningful for older students. Sarah Mitchell  Author - Teaching Structured Literacy Series Contact Info: [email protected]  Structured Literacy for Older Students:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/360409786946482  Founder - Morphology Hub Website: www.morphologyhub.com Social media: YouTube @sarahmitchell3941

Teaching about morphemes (the meaningful components of words), sentence structure (syntax) and grammar (the framework for organizing words and sentences) isn’t hard, once you learn about two new resources: Mary Beth Steven’s Dramatic Scripts and Meghan Hicks and Louise Hewitt’s The Sentence Studio. In fact, you can learn about these vital components of language as you teach your students by using their scripts, sentence and text practices. Their common goal is to create insightful readers and articulate writers.  These educators recognize that word study, syntax and grammar go to the heart of reading comprehension and written expression. They also focus on responsive teaching that brings these topics alive through rich highly engaging activities. Mary Beth Steven book, Enhancing the Teaching of Morphology and Grammar with Dramatic Scripts for the Classroom, uses plays to build reading comprehension while creating a collaborative classroom. Meghan and Louise’s new instructional guide, The Sentence Studio, teaches grammar and syntax with fables and a groundbreaking BubbleMap analysis strategy. Educators and students discover the artistry of sentence structure while unlocking the meaning that lies within every sentence You can find more information about Mary Beth’s book on her classroom blog mbsteven.edublogs.org You can purchase The Sentence Studio and access free downloads and other supporting resources at Meghan and Louise’s website www.scienceofthesentence.com

Title: Meet the Students / Humans of the Boring (into words) Scholars Collective Listen Sara Leland’s students, five humans who have dyslexia, ADHA and/or autism. With Sara’s guidance and support they grew to love literacy. They joined together and built a website www.boringscholarscollective.site. The boring scholars used their writing, creative and artistic skills to express their love of reading and writing through the website. Learn how they became word detectives, deeply investigating the spelling, meaning and history of words.  Sara shares how she develops a fascination for words in children who may have struggled with basic skills. She explains that the ultimate purpose of education is human development, helping children to grow into capable, curious, creative and empathic citizens. You’ll also learn how a philosopher views language, filled with metaphors and narratives, fueled by critical thinking.    Sara’s own website is:  www.wordscholars.net Sara can be contacted through the site or by email at:  [email protected]

If you have ever wondered why your students struggle with word reading, or read accurately but with limited comprehension, then you may want to flip your approach to reading instruction. Start at the sentence level by using Xiuhong Tong and Hélène Deacon’s groundbreaking Linguistics Pathways Model, which provides two parallel paths leading to reading comprehension. The first pathway leads to word recognition by morphological decoding. Deacon and Tong show how word reading and meaning arise from an awareness of how morphemes—the meaningful components that compose all words—are linked to graphemes. Unlike phonics decoding, students develop word reading, spelling and vocabulary knowledge in unison, which supports reading comprehension.  The second pathway is a syntax to sentence pathway. Syntax, the blueprint for creating and understanding sentences, is the layer of language that most directly supports reading comprehension and fluency. Together, words are not only read with meaning but as part of meaningful sentences – which largely determines text comprehension. Xiuhong Tong and S. Helene Deacon 2025. The Linguistic Pathways Model: Capturing the Multiple Dimensions of Reading Development. Reading Research Quarterly

Meghan Hicks returns to talk about how teaching structure at the word, sentence, and text levels can help students make sense of the writing process. We often discuss literacy as a system and the importance of students understanding how it works. Meghan explains the broader system and how her students discover that the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.  You’ll learn that syntax—how sentences are constructed from words, phrases and clauses—isn’t an abstract language concept. Rather, it is a straightforward way to improve reading comprehension and sentence construction. Meghan explains a simple sentence diagramming method that provides visual representations of sentence structure. Meghan also dives into the cognitive aspects of writing, starting with thinking. Students who can structure their thoughts are better able to structure their sentences. You learn about the four categories of thinking and how they influence students’ writing.   You can contact Meg at [email protected]  or visit the Think~Write~Read Community  Bruce Howlett's Seven Layers of Literacy Project - ReadingShift.com

Bonnie Feeney, a dyslexic mother and Jen Petrich, her PhD neuroscientist daughter discuss dyslexia from a unique perspective—one of from a journey of personal discovery and the other from studying brain science. Hear how their journeys came together, enriching both their lives.  Learn the difficulties that dyslexics confront within and beyond the classroom. Dyslexics share more than a diagnosis and supporting them requires more than just a reading intervention. They deserve our respect and understanding.  For decades, Bonny experienced biases and judgments that included narrow instruction that didn’t develop her interest in language. Jen became a neuroscientist not to help her mother, but to understand neurodiversity and find methods that support students broadly. Bonny began to listen in on Jen’s tutoring sessions with students and realized that this type of word and sentence inquiry made sense to her.  A note from Jennifer Petrich: I would like to clarify a comment I made on this podcast episode that doesn’t reflect my true beliefs. In recounting someone else’s experience, I used language and framing that I no longer align with, including referring to a good IQ and not being dumb. I believe that measures like IQ do not define a person’s worth or fully capture their abilities, and I’m mindful that words we use—especially casually—can reinforce harmful assumptions. This was an unfiltered moment, and I’m committed to being more thoughtful and aware of my language and biases moving forward. Bruce Howlett’s Seven Layers of Literacy Approach: ReadingShift.com Literacy Dr website: https://www.theliteracydr.com D.O.T.S. course info and registration: https://www.theliteracydr.com/pd/dots Wednesdays with Literacy Dr (free drop-in) info and registration: https://www.theliteracydr.com/drop-in Literacy Dr videos: https://www.theliteracydr.com/videos List of Resources for Further Learning: https://cb29367d-4ec0-40b5-af0b-a46966ed9d5a.filesusr.com/ugd/2c8fa0_47cff29b89e34ae2bcf16d59670de2d7.pdf

“Just thinking about grammar and syntax raises my anxiety.” Whether you share that reaction or you just feel shaky on some aspects of writing and sentence structure, you aren’t alone. Such a complex topic is not mastered in a one-and-done class. Yet it takes intellectual courage to become a student again and not to give up, especially when we are already acknowledged experts in our professions. In these days of mandated curricula, it isn’t easy to step out of the paradigm that currently dictates how education unfolds; but these two educators, Rebecca and Meghan, have found that it is still possible to create a community of true scholarship with your students—whether youths or adults. Meghan Hicks talks about “The Boy’s Writing Group” where her teenage students uncover the power of written communications and self-expression.  The Boys learn to review and revise their sentences as a group, discovering how writing gives them a voice to express their thoughts, ideas and feelings. Unlocking the power of sentences enriches students and teachers’ lives This is particularly important in the age of limited interest in book reading, mindless Internet scrolling, social media and AI.   You can contact Meg at [email protected] or visit the Think~Write~Read Community  You can contact Rebecca at [email protected].

“Spell what you mean, not just what you hear,” is researcher and speech pathologist Kim Murphy’s advice to students. While spelling instruction often focuses on pronunciation, spelling-meaning instruction makes so much more sense to students and their teachers. Graphemes (letter patterns) and morphemes, the meaningful core of every written word, spell words in predictable and consistent ways, even as their pronunciation shifts.   Joined by Peter Bowers, creator of Structured Word Inquiry, Kim shows that yes, English spelling is complex, but it doesn’t have to be confusing. In fact, students enjoy learning spelling-meaning connections, as they make sense and are easier to memorize and recall accurately when writing.  Kim and Pete also explain why spelling lists pale in comparison to morphological word sums and matrices, which organize the spelling of words around a common base. As a bonus, Kim shows how spelling-meaning connections benefit reading comprehension.  [email protected] ReadingShift.com  Kim Murphy: Contact Kim at The Scottish Rite Childhood Language Center in Richmond, VA.  Perfetti, C., & Stafura, J. (2014). Word knowledge in a theory of reading comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 22-37. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.827687 Free access link https://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/perfettilab/pubpdfs/WordKnowledge.pdf This article describes the Reading Systems Framework, in which the lexicon, or word knowledge, is a central connection point between word identification with reading comprehension. Aligned with the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Hart, 2002), the lexicon is seen as a ‘pressure point’ in the reading system. Murphy, K.A., & Justice, L.M. (2019). Lexical-level predictors of reading comprehension in third grade: Is spelling a unique contributor? American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 28(4), 1597-1610. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_AJSLP-18-0299  Free access link https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=cdse_pubs This study examines the contributions of lexical-level skills to reading comprehension, and whether spelling adds anything unique to the prediction of reading comprehension. Spelling was scored using binary (correct-incorrect) and non-binary (partially correct) methods. Results showed that spelling uniquely predicted reading comprehension, above and beyond the contribution of word recognition and vocabulary combined when scored using Correct Letter Sequences. This highlights the importance of including assessment of spelling skills when evaluating children for reading comprehension difficulties. Murphy, K.A., & Diehm, E.A. (2020). Collecting words: A clinical example of a morphology-focused orthographic intervention. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 51(3), 544-560.  https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_LSHSS-19-00050 This paper describes a morphology-focused orthography intervention for children with word-level reading and spelling difficulties, using Structured Word Inquiry. Results comparing pre- and post-test scores showed that children improved in reading and/or spelling, and that their largest gains were in spelling affixes correctly. The study supports the use of interventions that integrate morphology with orthography and phonology to improve children’s literacy skills.