Financial Disclosure:

Katie Squires, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-CL received an honorarium for this course. Lisa Barnett, BS.Ed received an honorarium for this course and is co-author of Vocabulary and Morphology using Structured Word Inquiry

Non-Financial Disclosure:

Katie Squires is a founding member of SWIRV and co-author of Vocabulary and Morphology using Structured Word Inquiry. Lisa Barnett is a member of SWIRV.

When students are stuck on spelling a word, they are often told to “sound it out.” For many words, this is not a meaningful solution and students are left wondering why does isn’t spelled “duz” or why one doesn’t start with a “w” or what in the world the “w” is doing in the middle of the word two? Spelling then becomes a memorization task, and students assume that spelling is illogical and does not make sense. In fact, the opposite is true! English spelling is well-ordered and consistent (Bowers & Bowers, 2017). When we utilize research-based principles for teaching written spelling, students no longer need to memorize random strings of letters, but instead they can use scientific inquiry to investigate and create a testable hypothesis about why a word is spelled a certain way.

There are some questions that must be asked to determine the interrelationship among the linguistic elements that contribute to a word’s spelling. Pete Bowers (2009, updated 2023) proposes these four questions meant to uncover the morphophonemic nature of English orthography:

1. What is the sense and meaning of the word?

2. How is it constructed? (In other words, can you identify any morphemes? Are there spelling changes that occur because of suffixes?)

3. What other related words can you find? (Morphological relatives share a historical root and a modern English base. Etymological relatives share a historical root (but not necessarily the spelling of the base).

4. How are the graphemes functioning in your word? (Do they function for words across the morphological family? Does the word origin influence the grapheme choice? Are there any graphemes marking something other than phonemes?)

When educators teach students how to analyze a word’s morphological structure, the students not only improve their spelling skills, but they also make statistically and clinically significant gains in vocabulary, phonological awareness, and reading (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010; Haight, 2022; Hastings & Trexler, 2021; Kirby & Bowers, 2017; Murphy & Diehm, 2020). These researchers, among others, discovered benefits for students from preschool through 12th grade, for those with typical abilities as well as those with learning disabilities, and for students who do not speak English as a first language.

Students who are taught how to approach spelling through a structured and explicit process become confident spellers instead of unsure guessers. They also become motivated to continue learning because nothing motivates like understanding.

Participants will be able to:
• Describe what SWI is and how it relates to structured literacy
• Identify morphological word families
• Synthesize and analyze word sums
• Choose phoneme/grapheme correspondences that represent entire morphological family

Time-Ordered Agenda
05 minutes: Introduction and disclosures
10 minutes – Describe what SWI is and how it relates to structured literacy
10 minutes – Identify morphology and etymological word families
20 minutes – Choose phoneme/grapheme correspondences that represent entire morphological family
20 minutes – Create word sums and matrices to visually show morphological relationships
10 minutes – Practice investigating words
15 minutes – Moderated question and answer session