While attending an International Dyslexia Association, Northern California event in 2015, Dr. Marcia Henry, one of the country's leading experts on reading instruction and dyslexia introduced me to Peter Bowers, Ph.D., of Word Works Kingston. He was doing groundbreaking work in teacher training using structured word inquiry (SWI) at the Nueva School in the SF Bay Area. Attending one of his workshops, I discovered that the interrelation of morphology, etymology, and phonology was the missing link for spelling instruction. He revealed the scientific basis for exploring words; using a word sum and suffixing conventions, the base reveals itself as part of a larger family of words that share meaning and structure. If the meaning is the same, the spelling is the same! The research is promising: young and struggling students benefit the most from structured word inquiry. Once I became familiar with the word matrix, I realized that phonics and memorization only scratched the surface of how our English writing system works.
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