Presenter: Dr. Peter Bowers

We owe all students every opportunity to receive strong, research-based instruction for the development of vocabulary. Those who struggle with language, reading, and spelling are in even greater need of powerful strategies to develop those vocabulary skills. Join this interactive webinar, presented by a world renowned expert, and walk away with proven strategies that you can use right away. This session is appropriate for those working with students in Kindergarten and higher.

“English spelling is a highly regular system for representing the pronunciations and meanings of words.”

The above statement may seem absurd. How can a “highly regular” system have so many spellings like does, been, two, people, rough, love, because, of, sign, and countless others that don’t follow the letter-sound correspondences? The problem is not the spelling system, but how we have been looking at it. We can explain spellings like this when we understand that grapheme-phoneme correspondences are driven by meaning cues. Without morphology, we have no way of explaining why “sign” has the letter “g” in it. Drawing attention to morphological relatives of “sign” (e.g. signal, designate, signature), shows that the “g” is needed to provide a spelling-meaning correspondence for every word with the base “sign.” Accurate spelling is more dependent upon consistent spelling of meaning over consistent spelling of pronunciation. This same principle of “morphemic transparency” (Share, 2021) explains the spelling of “does” (do + es —> does) and “because” (be + cause —> because).

This webinar focuses on how to study morphological families with matrices, word sums and etymological references (references to countries of origin of word parts) to build vocabulary. The study that introduced “Structured Word Inquiry” - SWI (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) was a vocabulary study with Grade 4 and 5 students that showed increased ability to generate vocabulary learning for the experimental group. As we see with linking the spelling/meaning/pronunciation for the words “sign” and “designate” or “do” and “does,” these same principles apply for exponential vocabulary growth in early and upper grades. Explicit attention to the interrelation of morphology and phonology will be discussed it is a central aspect of recent reading theory including Duke and Cartwright’s (2020) “Active Reading Model” and our “Morphology as a Binding Agent” theory (Bowers & Kirby, 2010; Kirby & Bowers, 2017).

About the Presenter:

Peter Bowers, Ph.D., is a researcher, author, educator and founder of WordWorks Literacy Centre. His vocabulary intervention (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) introduced the phrase, “structured word inquiry.” That study with grade four and five students found generative vocabulary learning for the SWI condition over controls. He has published widely on SWI and the effects of morphology instruction. Counter to typical assumptions, younger and less able students gain the most from including morphology in literacy instruction. Further the greatest effects of morphological instruction are for phonological gains. Bowers has been invited to present Keynote addresses at major literacy conferences in North America (e.g. IDA and ASHA) the UK (PATOSS) and Australia (ALEA) and has worked with educators and students in schools around the world for over a decade. Bowers's work seeks to illuminate the best evidence of research and practice for educators and researchers.

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PLEASE NOTE: The information provided in this hot topic webinar may not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of Reading with TLC.