Morphology: What is it and why should we teach it?

The Morphology Kit™  provides you with materials to support students' development of morphological awareness. But why is morphological awareness so important in the first place?

A Reading League PA webinar by Dr. Julie Klingerman, titled DIY Morphology, does an excellent job explaining why it’s critical to explicitly teach morphology. As she explains, morphological awareness contributes to proficiency in word recognition, spelling, vocabulary, and overall comprehension. And this is particularly true for students with learning differences. 

Morphological awareness is an understanding that our words are made up of individual morphemes that can be combined and sequenced to indicate meaning. Dr. Klingerman refers to it as a kind of metacognition that also includes a deeper understanding of the structure and purpose of a morpheme. 

English, she reminds us, is deciphered by sound and meaning. Morphological awareness further promotes orthographic mapping because sound, symbols, and meaning are all part of the process that allows us to instantly recognize words. In the webinar, Dr. Klingerman reminds us of Dr. Louisa Moats’ claim: When it comes to spelling, meaning trumps sound. 

While there isn't a single definition of morphological awareness, Dr. Kenn Apel defines it as follows*:

(a) awareness of spoken and written forms of morphemes; 

(b) the meaning of affixes and the alterations in meaning and grammatical class they bring to base words/roots (e.g., -ed causes a verb to refer to the past as in walked; -er can change a verb to a noun, as in teach to teacher); 

(c) the manner in which written affixes connect to base words/roots, including changes to those base words/roots (e.g., some suffixes require a consonant to be doubled or dropped when attached to a base word/root in written form, such as in hop to hopping and hope to hoped); and 

(d) the relation between base words/roots and their inflected or derived forms
(e.g., knowing that a variety of words are related because they share the same base word/root, such
as act, action, react, and activity).

Latin morphology instruction is essential for students in upper elementary and middle school. In her textbook, Speech to Print, Dr. Moats writes, "The impact of morphological awareness on vocabulary, reading, and spelling development is measurable at all grade levels, but appears to be most intense in the intermediate grades, when students must learn thousands of new words in the content areas." 

Dr. Klingerman also references a 2006 study by Nagy, Berninger, and Abbot that found that morphological awareness is highly correlated with vocabulary knowledge in fourth and fifth grades. 

Approximately 60% of words are Latin in origin, and tier two academic words found across subject areas contain Latin-based roots and affixes. Dr. Klingerman further points out that students enjoy learning about the structure and meaning of words — yet another compelling reason to include explicit morphology instruction in our lessons!

* Top Lang Disorders Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 197–209, Copyright 2014 Wolters Kluwer Health, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, “A Comprehensive Definition of Morphological Awareness, Implications for Assessment,” Kenn Apel