Spelling-Out Orthography: Writing-out-loud, spelling-out-loud and how SWI draws on instructional recommendations from Cognitive Load Theory

May 21 & 28 (Wednesday, 7:30 - 9:30 pm EST)

Recordings will be available for a month after the course is over.

Learn this everyday SWI practice and how it explicitly targets:

How grapheme choice is constrained by morphology

Pete provides a basic description of this practice in the Bowers and Kirby (2010) intervention study that introduce the term structured word inquiry. Pete's experience with teachers and students, and the link to cognitive load theory have increased his emphasis on the practice. While Pete originally developed this practice for student learning, he's discovered that it is equally important for teacher learning of how our orthography system works.

You can see illustrations and descriptions of this process on Pete's website.

Participants will see how those that take on this practice are forced to address all the orthographic structures in words -- morphemes, graphemes and orthographic markers -- as well as any suffixing changes.

The two 2-hour sessions provide time to practice this process in real time but also to address key orthographic concepts about how graphemes work that are little understood outside of SWI.

We also look at how the practice of ’spelling-out-orthography’ builds on recommendations from cognitive load theory.

Pete shows how this practice is rich not just to understanding spelling, but for reading instruction.

Learn how this practice fits with the theory of ‘Orthographic Mapping’

Many people are interested ‘orthographic mapping’. The underlying idea of this practice is logical, but typical descriptions of that practice only attend to one aspect of orthography -- grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

Spelling-out-orthography is a way to map not only grapheme-phoneme correspondences but all orthographic structures including morphemes and orthographic markers - thus including a semantic component that is absent when we artificially restrict attention to just grapheme-phoneme aspects of orthography.

You can watch Pete discuss the role of morphological instruction for language comprehension in this video  from the Reading League Summit.

This video discusses  the structure of English orthography and how the matrix and word sum guide instruction to align with the universal combinatorial structure of language as described in David Share’s (2025) major new paper. 

<span data-offset-key="2kb3l-1-0" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px solid rgb(229, 231, 235); --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-transform: translateX(0) translateY(0) rotate(0) skewX(0) skewY(0) scaleX(1) scaleY(1); --tw-border-opacity: 1; --tw-ring-inset: ; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,0.5); --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-blur: ; --tw-brightness: ; --tw-contrast: ; --tw-grayscale: ; --tw-hue-rotate: ; --tw-invert: ; --tw-saturate: ; --tw-sepia: ; --tw-drop-shadow: ; --tw-filter:         ; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><span data-text="true" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px solid rgb(229, 231, 235); --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-transform: translateX(0) translateY(0) rotate(0) skewX(0) skewY(0) scaleX(1) scaleY(1); --tw-border-opacity: 1; --tw-ring-inset: ; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,0.5); --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-blur: ; --tw-brightness: ; --tw-contrast: ; --tw-grayscale: ; --tw-hue-rotate: ; --tw-invert: ; --tw-saturate: ; --tw-sepia: ; --tw-drop-shadow: ; --tw-filter:         ; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pete's website.</span></span>

Spelling-Out Orthography Spring 2025

Course Overview

Meet the course producers