About WordWorks
(See links to research at bottom of page)
Background on WordWorks & Peter Bowers
Peter Bowers, PhD, is the founder of the WordWorks Literacy Centre in Ontario, Canada. For most of his ten years as an elementary school teacher in international schools and in Canada, Peter shared the common view that English spelling is highly irregular and full of exceptions to be memorized.
In his 9th year in the classroom, he and his Grade 4 students started to make sense of the spelling system when they began working with a resource called Real Spelling. Instead of studying lists of words, or spelling patterns with countless exceptions, they used scientific inquiry to investigate the underlying structures and conventions that link related words with consistent spelling despite changes in pronunciation. For example, if a student asked, “Why is there a <g> in sign?” the class would look for related words containing sign and find words like signal, signature, design and designate. Not only did we find a good reason for that letter <g>, but we discovered meaning connections between words we had never considered before; deepening and expanding our vocabulary in the process. Most importantly, through investigations like this, our class became a team of engaged word scientists. A surprising spelling was no longer experienced as another frustrating “irregular” word to memorize. Now words like does, rough, and business became launching pads for discovery.
This revelatory classroom experience inspired Peter to begin his graduate work. His Grade 4/5 morphological intervention published in the journal Reading and Writing (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) tested the effect of this instructional approach they called “structured word inquiry” and found positive effects on vocabulary learning.
Peter Bowers’ workshops and presentations are engaging, practical sessions that model structured word inquiry classroom activities. His presentations have been received enthusiastically at international schools and scientific conferences in Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
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•Guiding Principles, Concepts & Practices of Structured Word Inquiry (SWI)
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Click image at right for this document on SWI
Pete’s Research related to Structured Word Inquiry
Published articles
Anderson, Whiting, Bowers, Venable, (2019), Learning to be literate: An orthographic journey with young students in R. Cox, S. Feez, L. Beveridge (Eds.) The Alphabetic Principle and beyond... surveying the landscape. Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA).
Bowers, J.S. & Bowers, P.N., (2021). The science of reading provides little or no support for the widespread claim that systematic phonics should be part of initial reading instruction: A response to Buckingham. doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f5qyu
Bowers, J.S., Bowers, P.N. (2019). A case for why both sides in the ‘reading wars’ debate are wrong — and a proposed solution. Washington Post article in column by Valerie Strauss
Bowers, J.S., Bowers, P.N. (2018). Progress in reading instruction requires a better understanding of the English spelling system. Current Directions in Psychological Science 27, 407-412.
Bowers, J.S., and Bowers, P.N. (2018). The importance of correctly characterizing the English spelling system when devising and evaluating methods of reading instruction: Comment on Taylor, Davis, and Rastle (2017). Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 1497-1500.
Bowers, J.S. & Bowers, P.N. (2018). There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that systematic phonics should precede morphological instruction: Response to Rastle and colleagues PsyArXiv. https://psyarxiv.com/zg6wr/
Bowers, J.S., Bowers, P.N. (2017). Beyond Phonics: The Case for Teaching Children the Logic of the English Spelling System. Educational Psychologist, 2, 124-141.
Bowers, P. (2022, April 2). Structured Word Inquiry (SWI): Literacy instruction that makes sense of English spelling for students of all ages and abilities. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/aktzw
Bowers, P.N. (2021) Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) Teaches Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences More Explicitly Than Phonics Does: An open letter to Jennifer Buckingham and the reading research community. doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7qpyd
Bowers, P.N., Cooke, G. (2012, Fall). Morphology and the Common Core: Building students’ understanding of the Written Word. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 31-35
Bowers, P.N., Kirby, J.R., & Deacon, S.H. (2010) The Effects of Morphological Instruction on Literacy Skills: A Systematic Review of the Literature, Review of Educational Research, 80, 144–179.
Bowers, P.N. & Kirby, J.R. (2010) Effects of Morphological instruction on Vocabulary Acquisition, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23, 515–537.
Georgiou, G. K., Savage, R., Dunn, K., Bowers, P., & Parrila, R. (2021). Examining the effects of Structured Word Inquiry on the reading and spelling skills of persistently poor Grade 3 readers. Journal of Research in Reading, 44(1), 131-153.
Kirby, J. R. & Bowers, P. N. (2018). The effects of morphological instruction on vocabulary learning, reading, and spelling. In R. Berthiaume, D. Daigle, & A. Desrochers (Eds.), Issues in Morphological Processing. Routledge.
Kirby, J. R. & Bowers, P. N. (2017). Morphological instruction and literacy: Binding phonological, orthographic, and semantic features of words. In K. Cain, D. Compton, & R. Parrila, (Eds.), Theories of reading development. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kirby, J.R. & Bowers, P.N. (2012). Morphology Works. What Works? Research into Practice, Ontario Ministry of Education Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat.
Kirby, J.R., Deacon, S.H., Bowers, P.N., Izenberg, L. Wade-Wooley, L., Parrila, R. (2012) Morphological awareness and reading ability, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25, 389-410.
Ng, M., Bowers, P.N. & Bowers, J.S., (Preprint). A promising new tool for literacy instruction: The morphological matrix.
Teacher Resource Book
Bowers, P. (2009). Teaching how the written word works. (See this link.)
Doctoral dissertation
Bowers, P. (2012). Morphological Instruction in the Elementary Classroom
Master’s Thesis (2006-2007 Queen’s Faculty of Education Thesis Prize)
Bowers, P. (2006) Adding Transparency to Morphologically Opaque Words Through Instruction
WordWorks Presentations On-Line
Over the years various institutions and blogs have invited me to present on structured word inquiry in on-line contexts or for permission for videos of sessions to be posted on blogs. I’ve collected some of those on this page. These presentations can be much more effective at communicating these ideas than pages of text. I hope you find them informative.
“Morphology Instruction and Language Comprehension” for The Reading League Summit April 2025
Click HERE for my talk on the literacy comprehension panel at this important annual conference.
“The Morphological Matrix Matters Because Language is Combinatorial”
Click HERE for my talk for the 9th Annual DTI Virtual Dyslexia Conference. This is the companion video to the one on combinitorality with Marie Foley (2024). It is the most detailed talk on combinatoriality, the matrix and word sum and how it fits with current research.
“The Nested Combinatorial Structure of English Spelling”
Click HERE for this video builds on David Share’s (2025) major article “Blueprint for a Universal Theory of Learning to Read: The Combinatorial Model”. that is still in press, but accepted for publication by Reading Research Quarterly. The pre-print of that article is available HERE
I was delighted to be invited to talk with Dr. Warren about Structured Word Inquiry on her podcast. We go into detail about orthography and how we can help all students, but especially struggling students by explicitly teaching how our writing system works.
Click HERE for the website for the podcast with many related links to the discussion.
In this interview I discuss the theory, practice and research of SWI. The host was new to SWI which provided a rich opportunity to respond to the kinds of questions novices to this work typically have.
Links to listen to podcast or watch videos
I recommend the videos for clearer understanding.
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๏Video 1 is HERE. (1 hr, 13 min -- same as audio Part)
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๏Video 2 is HERE. (33 min)
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๏Video 3 is HERE. (35 min -- research focus)
Those interested in the research discussion can find it near the end of video 2 at the 29 minute mark at THIS LINK. That discussion continues in Video 3 (33 min).
To listen to audio...
(Recommended as a an introduction to the ‘big picture’ of SWI)
Click HERE for this 18 min video of my talk at this TEDx event organized by students at The Nueva School near San Francisco that has done such seminal work with SWI. This video provides a brief overview to the theory and practice.
Click HERE for a description of SWI from the Nueva School with other helpful, short videos.
Presentation for Dyslexia Training Institute’s 2nd annual virtual conference (2018)
Click HERE for a video presentation by Pete Bowers for the Dyslexia Training Institute’s 2nd Annual Virtual Conference. This video tries to clarify exactly what structured word inquiry is, and where it fits in the research.
Click HERE for a pdf with selected notes to go along with the above video.
Podcast with Anna Geiger on the Measured Mom Podcast
Click HERE for this podcast that many have described as a particularly rich introduction to SWI. See tons of related resources linked at that website to go along with the talk.
Video of my interview on ‘The Reading Teacher’s Lounge
Click HERE for the video of this excellent discussion for those new to SWI and those trying to dig deeper.
