Information on Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) (Dyslexia Training Institute)

Description:

Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is based on linguistics, the scientific approach to understanding language. Through SWI we have learned that English is really a morphophonemic language (words are spelled based on meaning) and is stress-timed, not a syllable-timed language. Although we can break many of our words into syllables, as you may have seen through teaching or other examples, not all words work that way. And, phonology (how we sound out words) can shift within a word family when we add different prefixes and suffixes. Using the SWI approach we first look at the morphology (meaning of the morphemes) of the word, then the etymology (history of the spelling of the word), and then phonology (graphemes used to represent the phonemes you hear, but not all graphemes in a word have phonological representation because they are lexical markers/etymological markers/zero allophones). So, the final spelling and pronunciation of a word is determined by morphology, etymology and phonology, in that order.