Ep.111-Phonics vs SWI for Beginning Readers with Peter Bowers

The One About…
Phonics vs SWI for Beginning Readers with Peter Bowers
Quote from article:
How realistic is it to introduce a method that may in fact be too complicated for teacher and student alike-and particularly problematic for beginning reading instruction?
Pete Bowers Bio:
Peter Bowers runs the “WordWorks Literacy Centre”
consultancy that targets Structured Word Inquiry in his work
with schools, teachers, and students.
wordworkskings...
Video 1:
The Nested Structure of English Spelling: A study in the binding power of structure and meaning - and everyday combinatoriality (Bowers & Foley, 2024)
www.youtube.co...
Video 2:
Spelling-Out Orthography in SWI to build graphemic and morphological knowledge
• Spelling-Out Orthograp...
Contact Dr. Peter Bowers
[e-mail]
www.wordworksinternational.com
/ @wordworkskingston
The Literacy View
Ep.109-Meta on Morphology! What Should We Do? with Dr. Danielle Colenbrander
• Ep.109-Meta on Morphol...
Article:
Must Phonics Fail in Order for Structured Word Inquiry to Succeed?
Harriett Janetos, Reading Specialist
January 8, 2025
learningbydesi...

[@HollyOnHandwriting-fi2pm]

It is so important that teachers keep learning about the English language and how children acquire language. If we're open to incorporating new knowledge into our schema, then info like this isn't a threat to our teaching, it is simply putting tools in our teaching toolbox. I love this stuff. (And I love your podcast.)

[@juliebosket5277]

Yes! I'm constantly learning with my students. You just have to be curious. I think the biggest barrier is that SWI doesn't offer a scope and sequence. But like Pete said, use what you are using, just don't teach something that you later have to unteach.

[@ralphmason]

It's a bit of a shame Pete didn't get to finish the example of teaching I-N-G to the fourth-grader, at it's very revealing. (He does discuss it in other videos, with video footage.) The boy could not remember letter names to save himself, but took to suffixes like I-N-G like a duck to water, and very proudly displayed his growing list of suffixes and prefixes at home. His teacher was amazed that he was suddenly grasping the letter names and identifying prefixes and suffixes in words and successfully reading out longer words. The grouping of letters together, along with morphology study, seemed to be the key to helping this boy out of his dyslexic ditch.

[@SMPliteracy]

I have used SWI with struggling learners who couldn’t learn with phonics for 9 years. Children who were stuck on three letter words for years started learning to read and spell. They learn beginning suffixes before they make sense of short vowels when morphology and phonology are taught together. Learning the morphology leads to them to learning the phonology over time. This is in line with the research that reported morphology instruction led to increased phonological awareness ability without directly targeting phonological awareness skills. If you want to teach to the middle use phonics if you want to reach all learners use SWI. By the way I think Pete was gracious to continue after being interrupted so many times. He wasn’t able to finish and make his point and your comments indicated your misunderstanding and prevented the listener from following the topic.

[@juliebosket5277]

As a tutor who often meets kids after years of failed phonics first school intervention I have some thoughts. First, many of my students know how to sound out words letter by letter without any regard to graphemes (digraph, trigraph, consonant blends and clusters or vowel glides) or vowels that may be affecting preceding graphemes. But if they are a somewhat adept reader, their spelling is phonetic...that's cognitive overload. When writing a sentence and paying attention to what one is writing and how to form the letters and then spelling, they often resort to sounding it out which fails. To correct I might ask, what do you mean, and if they've studied with me, they often see their errors. One speaker expressed hesitation about spelling out a word by letter names as it can confuse a kid for spelling empty or enter. If you have taught kids how to spell out a word by "graphemes" not letters, they have an awareness of what grapheme choices. Also, do letters ever write "their name". Where would they get that idea? Does phonics terminology still teach (or teachers still teach) "silent e" or "magic e" as making the vowel before it "say its name". I once asked a 5th grade student what is writing in "break". We had the word in front of us, and he said "e". I then said "break". His response: "Wait a minute. My teacher told me that when two vowels go a walking, the first one does the talking." Don't teach something you will have to unteach later. The idea that kids are not ready for prefixes and suffixes in Pre-k - first grade is preposterous. If you ask a kid to redo something, do they know what you mean? If you don't know, ask them. I've never had a kid that has not said "do it again". We have morphological awareness through speech. A kid knows that when you have more than one cat, you have cats verbally. They also know that if you have more than one coffee mug you have mugs. If you show them the spelling, they have the flexibility to see that is writing two different phonemes in those words but the morpheme is the same. My issue with heart words or irregular words is this: they are irregular only based on exceptions to a phonics rule. The whole "I before e" rule has to do with writing "e" when followed by a ...or writing "a" in neighbor and weigh. Alternatively, one can teach the bound bound base morpheme and its connections to bound base morpheme and the underlying meaning connection. And with neighbor and weigh, we can teach about the trigraph and what it writes when it is the only vowel grapheme in the word and what it writes when it is preceded by another vowel letter. That requires a little knowledge about Old English etymology and may need to investigations in other Old English words and graphemes. I've been volunteering in a preschool class to observe a structured introduction into the written language and I see how we set kids for frustration and a lifelong belief that English spelling is "crazy" by introducing letters and sounds in isolation and when we limit them to CVC words. If a child knows what the word "leap" means, he should be taught how to spell it and read it and not by teaching them that writes "e" but it can write it and then later when it doesn't they aren't surprised.

[@jhunter270]

🤓 Well that clarified many things…

[@thinkSRSD]

Mic drop “th” “e”

[@anar7043]

Why are you bashing Pete? This came out very accusatory towards him even if that was not your intention. SWI is a great method once you learn and understand in. I've been trained in OG and also use SWI. SWI takes word learning to a whole other level.

[@rivkagurevitz9019]

I don't find Bowers convincing on why we think what we think. I believe him when he says that he isn't doing morphology training, he is doing SWI training. A lot of his people all bash phonics. They insist that phonics is evil. That doesn't come out of nowhere. I also feel that he creates strawmen.

[@juliebosket5277]

I've participated in Pete's on line drop-ins fairly regularly and have attended one of his workshops. I've never heard him "bash phonics". There are other resources that are critical of phonics based instruction and I'm sure there are people who also voice disdain for it but I think they got there on their own. What you need to ask yourself is what is the difference between phonics and phonology? Pete focus on phonology as an interrelated element of English orthography along with morphology and etymology is teaching the writing system that is through made visible through text. English is not a phonetic language like Spanish. In Spanish there are no silent letters and it prioritizes sound over morphemes. That said, you can find many shared Latinate base morphemes in both languages. If the sound changes, the morpheme changes in Spanish, but in English, the morphemes do not change. Because English spelling prioritizes morphemic structure, we can use our well ordered system to logically reason and relate the written word to the spoken word and the spoken word to the written one by using the connection of meaning and etymology explains why. Words are created with graphemes that may write phonemes and are ordered within morphemes to communicate meaning. Think of "cat". The same three letters writing the same phonemes when rearranged to "act" change the meaning. If a grapheme is not realized in pronunciation (like the in people or the in sign), it is present in the morpheme because it communicates meaning. English is also stress timed and stress timed languages are constantly changing as vowels reduce and consonants undergo lenition. An example of that is the word comfortable. Say it naturally in a sentence like: This chair is really comfortable. What part of its pronunciation only would help you spell the word? But look at its structure: com + fort + able.

[@hcfuraigon]

I would be interested in seeing how you substantiate the statement that "a lot of" people who have an association with Pete "bash phonics". Who is "they" (is it "a lot of his people", or "all"?)?