STRUCTURED WORD INQUIRY (SWI)
INTRODUCTION TO SWI – ON DEMAND WORKSHOP SERIES
If you missed the spring workshop you can access the recordings, activities, and materials on-demand!
Are you interested in going beyond phonics and phonemic awareness?
Are you curious about morphology? Do you want to develop a deeper understanding of how English actually works?!
This workshop series introduces the basics of a structured word inquiry approach, using examples of word sums and matrices as tools to investigate the morphological structure of words and show the relationships between words that share morphemes.
Participants will explore how phonology fits within this framework and learn the importance of understanding etymology.
This workshop was originally designed to complement Orton-Gillingham training and thus, although not a requirement, is well suited to those who have previous experience or training in a Structured Literacy approach or program. It is also suitable for those who have already started their exploration into SWI.
Join us for some fun learning about the structure and history of the English language!
Click here for link to register
Morphological awareness is the term used to describe one’s sensitivity to morphological structure and one’s ability to manipulate that structure. It has been shown to play a role in the development of vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling. The importance of teaching morphology has been gaining greater attention in recent years. Morphology focuses on how words are composed of meaningful parts; the smallest units of language that have grammatical function or meaning are known as morphemes. Studies have found that teaching morphology has significant positive effects across ages from preschool to grade 8 and effects are most pronounced with the youngest children and children with underdeveloped skills.
EVERYTHING!
Extremely well organized.
I like how there was lots of review. I didn’t understand some concepts at the beginning and was very happy to see that you reviewed and reviewed through all the videos.
This was an excellent workshop! Difficult concepts were broken down into very understandable pieces.
Highly recommended for every teacher.
The speaker was incredibly knowledgeable and engaging.
The content was relevant and useful.
There was lots of repetition, examples and videos!
This course was absolutely worth the time and money. Thank-you for the hard work in putting it all together.
I am grateful that you have shared it asynchronously.
I learned about twin/alternate bases, words with multiple bases, assimilated prefixes, and various resources to support SWI.
What I Liked About This Workshop
I like your style of instruction: it is systematic, logical and clear.
Liisa is a fantastic instructor. She has a way of distilling very complex information into an easy-to-understand sequence.
Her resources are also wonderful and she does a superb job of training the trainer.
The benefit of creating word sums and checking joins and how the repetition allows a student to think about all the possibilities that could happen before the rewrite
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One Thing I Knew But Understand Better Now:
I had heard about a matrix before but didn’t understand the benefit of how it can help students understand the relationships between words and to see patterns in words, as well as how to create other words from the base.
Liisa, you have so much knowledge to give and I appreciate the time you took to share that with us!
Looking forward to more courses!
I learned the value of working through the making of a matrix.
One Thing I Knew but Understand Better Now
How to better explain to students the suffixing conventions.
Liisa presents concepts clearly and embraced all questions.
I really enjoyed the course and interacting in break-out rooms with fellow classmates to work through exercises.
I highly recommend the Structured Word Inquiry Course!
What is Structured Word Inquiry? (SWI)?
“Structured word inquiry” is literacy instruction that uses a scientific inquiry approach to build an understanding that English orthography represents the meanings of words to speakers of the language through an interrelation of morphology, etymology and phonology.
It engages learners of all ages and abilities by making sense of our surprisingly logical spelling system. English spelling can only be understood through scientific investigation of the interrelationship of morphology (bases & affixes), etymology (historical influences) and phonology (grapheme-phoneme correspondences).
It uses “4 Questions of Structured Word Inquiry” as a guide to explore and understand the spelling of any word.