Learning Opportunities

Structured Word Inquiry (SWI)

Presented By

Peter Bowers

Series Sessions

Date Time
Thursday, January 20, 2022 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thursday, January 27, 2022 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Location

Virtual Online, Any location, AB

Though this is a standalone learning opportunity for beginners to Structured Word Inquiry (SWI), this two part series compliments Peter’s Tools of SWI sessions offered by NRLC in Nov/Dec 2021 and participants can be confident to register regardless. 

This learning opportunity will focus on three core interrelated understandings. (1) Deepening understanding of how English orthography works; (2) Becoming confident in your ability to independently investigate English orthography scientifically; (3) Learning how to use your understanding of # 1 and #2 to guide your instructional practice.

Session #1: SWI as scientific inquiry & word families 

Peter will introduce a “big picture” of structured word inquiry as the application of scientific inquiry about how our spelling system works and how to use that as a driving feature of literacy instruction for learners of all abilities and ages. Key to this “big picture” is introducing the linguistic concept of “word families” as words connected in spelling structure and meaning through activities used from the beginning of schooling. By the end of the session, participants have practice and resources for using the same type of activity with students of all ages/abilities. Participants will practice the process spelling-out-loud and writing-out-loud and tapping out of word structure introduced last session. We also look at how these processes and SWI in general reflect the recommendations of cognitive load theory - a major theory of learning in psychology. We also see how these processes are applied to the process of reading instruction.

Session #2: Digging deeper into morphological and etymological families 

For this session we dig deep into  morphological and etymological families working with the 4 questions of SWI, learning to read Etymonline and constructing matrices by hand. Middle school science text will be used as a launching pad for orthographic inquiries to build understanding of content concepts and terms. We use this context to learn how to read Etymonline to collect etymological relatives (those that share a root) and then word sums to identify which of those words are also morphological relatives (those that share a base).In the final part of our second session we look at questions about morphological and etymological relatives and how they interrelate with grapheme-phoneme correspondences. We build on all the concepts addressed over the two sessions and end with a careful look at the research related to SWI.

Please be advised that this series will be recorded and only registered participants will have access to the recording after each session. The recordings will be available for a period of 30days after which it will be permanently deleted from Zoom Cloud

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