What Seidenberg Just Said About Phonemic Awareness
And Why SWI Has Been Right About This All Along
By Shawna Pope-Jefferson, SLP ~ Structured Word Inquiry: Teaching Reading via Spelling
A few days ago, Mark Seidenberg released a new blog post titled “Where Did Phonemic Awareness Training Come From?”
If you haven’t read it yet, let me save you the suspense:
It is one of the clearest acknowledgments yet from within the Science of Reading (SOR) research community that our field has misunderstood phonemes, misapplied phonemic awareness (PA) training, and built entire instructional systems on false assumptions about how language works.
And here’s the thing:
This new post aligns almost perfectly with Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) teaching for decades.
The details matter, so let’s break down what Seidenberg says, and then let’s talk about why SWI was already living in this truth long before this shift began.
Seidenberg’s Key Point:
Phonemes Are Not What Reading Programs Think They Are**
One of the first things he establishes is that phonemes are theoretical constructs, not discrete packets of sound floating in the air.
He explains:
– Spoken language is continuous, not segmental.
– You cannot “hear” isolated phonemes.
– Children cannot perceive them without print.
– The idea of “teaching 44 phonemes” before reading has no basis in linguistic reality.
This directly contradicts the way phonics-heavy instruction presents phonemes:
“Here are the 44 sounds of English. Master these first, then we’ll get to reading.”
But phonologists know, and Seidenberg emphasizes that
– phonemes are categories inside the mind,
– not stable acoustic objects in the mouth or ear.
– Phonemes exist in words; they feel different when produced in isolation.
As I always say, “ the natural habitat of graphemes and phonemes is a word. The natural habitat of a word is a sentence.
If there is no word, there is no grapheme or phoneme. We don’t know what a grapheme is doing until it enters a word! Sometimes it’s to write a phoneme, and sometimes it’s doing a different job.
Children learn to notice phonemes in words because of literacy, not before it.
This single idea knocks over the entire premise of phoneme-first instruction.
His Second Major Point:
Phonemic Awareness Is An Outcome of Learning to Read
This is the part that should have made the literary world stop in its tracks.
Seidenberg states (plainly, finally)
– Phonemic awareness develops through reading
– It is not a prerequisite for reading.
– It is not the “foundation” programs claim it is.
– It does not arise in children as a natural pre-reading skill.
Children become aware of phonemes as they encounter print, not because they drilled oral phoneme games for months or years.
This matches decades of linguistic and cognitive science literature:
– Ehri (1998, 2014)
– Castles, Nation & Rastle (2018)
– Perfetti
– Share
-Liberman & Mattingly
And yes, it matches Structured Word Inquiry.
SWI has always taught:
You discover phonemes through the writing system, not through oral fragmentation of speech.
When we study <different>, <differ>, <differing>, the base <fer> and the morphemes teach us something about meaning first, and only then do we examine graphemes and phonemes in that meaningful context.
Phonology comes last, exactly where orthography puts it.
Seidenberg’s Critique of Isolated PA Drills Fits SWI Perfectly
In his post, he says:
– Oral-only PA drills are artificial
– They rely on impossible tasks (isolating sounds that don’t exist in isolation)
– They don’t reflect real speech
– They don’t reflect the way children naturally process language
– They don’t reflect the way orthography works
This is precisely why SWI rejects PA drills as the foundation of reading instruction.
SWI teaches:
-real words
-real structure
-real meaning
-real graphemes
-real phonology
-real morphology
-real etymology
Not “weird blips of sound” detached from print.
Not “say /t/ in isolation.”
Not “delete the /s/ from splat.”
Not “nonsense words demonstrate decoding.”
Seidenberg is now warning the field about the same problems SWI practitioners have highlighted for years.
Where did it come from?
– Phoneme Awareness tasks were invented by researchers for experiments
– They were added to assessments
– Then schools started teaching the assessment tasks
– Then publishers built curriculum around them
–Then the NRP locked the whole thing into federal reading policy
What happened?
They took a research probe and turned it into a whole curriculum.
Phonemic awareness drills weren’t part of reading instruction until the 1990s.
They’re not historically or linguistically justified.
They’re not part of the writing system.
And they are not the “foundation” of literacy.
They became foundational only because:
– the tests measured them
– the NRP amplified them
– commercial curriculum built on them
– and the SOR movement reinforced them with slogans
Not because they reflect how English spelling works.
So, Where Does SWI Fit Into This?
Front and Center.
SWI actually begins where Seidenberg’s post ends:
✔ Meaning first
If children do not understand the word, nothing else matters.
✔ Morphology second
Word structure reveals meaning relationships.
✔ Etymology third
History explains spelling and sound variation.
✔ Phonology last
Phonemes are understood within a meaningful word family, where they actually function.
SWI does not:
– isolate phonemes
– treat phonemes as the gateway to reading
– teach phonemes before graphemes or teach grapheme-phoneme correspondence as drills in isolation ( without a word)
– drill nonsense words
– claim children must “master all 44 sounds first”
– treat phonemic manipulation tasks as core instruction
– reduce reading to the “alphabetic principle”
SWI builds phonemic awareness naturally through:
– word sums
– matrices
– grapheme discussions
– morphology
– word families
– real reading
– authentic writing
– meaningful exploration
Exactly what Seidenberg just advised.
The Bottom Line:
SWI Aligns With the Science.
Phoneme-First Instruction Does Not.
Here’s the hand-on-heart truth of Seidenberg’s newest writing:
Phonemes are abstract.
Phonemic awareness develops through reading.
Phoneme-first instruction is based on false assumptions.
Isolated PA drills misrepresent how language works.
We need instruction that aligns with orthography, not with artificial tasks.
This is SWI.
This is what you teach with SWI.
This is what your kids thrive with when learning with SWI.
And this is where the literacy field is finally, slowly, catching up.
