Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) Teaches Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences More Explicitly Than Phonics Does: An open letter to Jennifer Buckingham and the reading research community
This “open letter” responds to a recent article by Buckingham (2020) which made the claim that the instructional approach known as “Structured Word Inquiry” (SWI) does not teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPC). I counter this claim and provide evidence for SWI’s teaching of GPCs by citing not only the publications on SWI, including the original article introducing it in 2010, but also provide many links to publicly available illustrations of GPC instruction by teachers working with SWI. A description is provided of the qualitative differences between how GPCs are taught in SWI and phonics. Unlike phonics, SWI explicitly teaches the role of morphology and etymology for making sense of grapheme choice in our morphophonemic language and provides graphic representations of orthographic structure to support this instruction. Research evidence about the effects of morphological instruction, including its positive effects on phonological learning, provide a strong basis to motivate more explicit research attention to structured word inquiry in general and specifically as a proposal for a novel form of instruction about GPCs across a wide range of ages and abilities. The debate about whether SWI type instruction is appropriate in the earliest instruction is addressed. I highlight two tools used in SWI, the matrix and the word sum. I show why these are essential for teaching the interrelation of morphology and phonology, but have been largely ignored by the research community so far.