Morphology Instruction
What Research Tells Us
Both the quantity and quality of word knowledge are very important. Recent research and theory have emphasized the importance of word knowledge in language and literacy development. Word knowledge goes far beyond knowing a simple definition of a word or being able to pronounce it.
All aspects of word knowledge (word meanings, syntactic roles, how the word sounds, and how the word is written) are linked in mental representations and the quality of those mental representations determines how well the word knowledge can be used.
What and Why?
✓ Morphology is the study of words and their parts. An important component of word knowledge is morphology which describes how words are composed of meaningful parts
✓ Morphemes, like prefixes, suffixes and base words, are defined as the smallest meaningful units in a word. Some words consist of only one morpheme (e.g., sign, table and have), while many others are composed of two or more morphemes (e.g., signs, design, resign, signature and designation).
✓ Morphology is a critical element of successful vocabulary development and accurate decoding. Awareness of morphology has been shown to be a strong indicator of and positive influence upon reading comprehension (Soifer, 2005).
✓ Memorising morphemes in isolation will not increase vocabulary and spelling. It is ‘morphological awareness, developed through brief explicit instruction, playful practice and opportunities use developing knowledge. that is a strong predictor of reading ability, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension.’ (Bowers, 2010)
The basic problem in learning to read words is associating semantics (what words mean), orthography (how words are written) and phonology (how words are pronounced). Morphology is fundamentally related to semantics, but it also provides important clues about how words should be written and pronounced.
Morphology also provides clues about how to pronounce words; for example, the /ea/ in reach represents one sound because it is within a morpheme, whereas in react these letters represent two sounds because they are in separate morphemes.
A morpheme is the “smallest grammatical unit.” It isn’t the same thing as a word, and yet many words are morphemes. The distinction turns on whether the unit (the morpheme or word) can stand on its own. Words have to have that kind of independence, while morphemes don’t require it.
Thus, bags, trucked, running, and redirect are all words in the English language while bag, s, truck, ed, run, ing, re, and direct are all morphemes. Each morphemic unit carries meaning, but sometimes morphemes can do that independently (bag, truck, run, direct), and sometimes they need to be combined with other morphemes to be considered a word (s, ed, ing, re).
How?
Although many students develop considerable morphological awareness on their own, explicit instruction is much more likely to result in extensive, accurate and generalizable morphological awareness.
There are opportunities in every subject to demonstrate morphological regularities. Though instruction should be primarily oral in the early phases of reading, written morphology should soon become involved.
Examples of Morphological Instructional Strategies:
• Use a Word Detective approach: After a morphological pattern has been taught, encourage students to search for examples in class texts.
• Incorporate word sums and word matrices (see below). Present words that might be related by a base (e.g., interrupt, corrupt, eruption) Have students identify a common base and test their hypotheses using word sums (e.g., inter + rupt, cor + rupt, e + rupt). Then construct a word matrix around this base.
• Collect data banks of morphemes: Create a sticky note morpheme chart in the class, adding affixes and bases as you encounter them.
• Use expository texts from a variety of subjects: For example, in a lesson on condensation in science, address the “density” of molecules in different states of matter. Use a word sum to identify the link in spelling and meaning between these words and their common base (con + dense/ + ate/ + ion condensation; dense/ + ity density).
• Invite students to use a SMART Board: This is good visual tool for matching morphemes with meanings and/or circling base words.
• Have students create sets of colour-coded morpheme cards: Students can use one colour for prefixes, another for suffixes. As new base words are introduced, have students create corresponding white cards, to use in conjunction with their affix cards.
*A helpful way to represent the morphological structure of words is to use word sums. For instance, signs is composed of two morphemes as illustrated in the following word sum:
Though instruction should be primarily oral at the beginning, written morphology should soon be introduced.
Terminology:
Resources:
Morphology matrices (grades 6-8)
Source:
WW_Morphology.pdf
