This one’s for the word nerds ??
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In honor of Word Nerd Day on January 9, this week’s edition of Literacy Leaders is all about morphology! Recently, a math teacher made a joke to me saying that if the English language actually made sense, why wasn’t it called “Hook-ed on P-Honics?”
What this educator didn’t know is that the English language is morphophonemic, which means that English words are not only represented by the sounds they contain but also by their meaning. In fact, the English spelling system actually prioritizes the consistent spelling of morphemes over phonemes! This prioritization of morphemes explains why students who have only received basic phonics instruction struggle to read and write multimorphemic words. Let’s talk about how morphemes and phonemes work together in English orthography.
Why Morphology Matters
Let’s look at the word rocks as an example. Phonetically, it could be spelled as rox, and it’s not uncommon to see students using developmental spelling such as this. However, the spelling rocks preserves the base morpheme rock (a solid mineral material) and the suffix -s ( more than one). This consistency helps readers quickly infer meaning (more than one rock). Without morphological awareness, students may overgeneralize phoneme-grapheme correspondences and produce incorrect spellings.
This principle extends to more complex word pairs, such as sign/insignia, person/persona, or cave/cavernous. Morphology uniquely supports both decoding skills and vocabulary knowledge, allowing students to both read unfamiliar words and comprehend them.
If you’re looking for even more reasons to add morphology into your instruction, research indicates that while phonological awareness predicts word reading in the early grades, by fifth grade, morphological skills become a stronger predictor of decoding ability. Furthermore, approximately 60% of unfamiliar words encountered in middle school texts are morphologically complex.
Tools for Teaching Morphology
A word matrix visually organizes morphological relationships between words. For example, studying the struct morpheme family can provide students with exposure to words like instruct, instruction, instructor, construct, construction, structure, obstruct, obstruction, and so many more. Providing striving readers with access to more complex vocabulary through word matrices can help demystify the long, multisyllabic words they may be tempted to skip over when reading grade-level texts. Be sure to check out our free morpheme matrix template here.
Word sums are another helpful tool that provides a hands-on way for students to practice combining morphemes and navigating suffix addition rules like when to drop the letter E at the end of the base morpheme. This free morpheme mapping tool is a helpful resource for breaking down some of the less transparent multimorphemic words your students may encounter.
By explicitly teaching morphology, we equip students with tools to decode multisyllabic words, tackle advanced vocabulary, and deepen their reading comprehension. How do you incorporate morphology into your instruction? We’d love to hear from you!
What We’re Working On
?? January's Literacy Leadership Network Topic:Fluency: More Than Just Reading Fast
Here's what's on the Literacy Leadership Network calendar for this month:
?? January 7: Live webinar to help you translate reading research into concrete plans for instructional change.
?? January 8: Webinar recording + members-only resources and downloads so you can take your learning with you.
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?? January 13: 2–4 short videos aligned to this month's topic so you can further your learning.
?? January 21: Live consultancy meeting to give you the time and space to receive feedback from and exchange ideas with peers.
? Week of January 27: Office hours to ask our literacy specialists questions about your specific school or district situation.
Fluency will be the focus of January's LLN topic, but that's not all you get access to in your LLN portal! The Literacy Leadership Network now provides access to all past months of LLN content! Our LLN resource library includes 100+ different resources, including downloads, videos, articles, and our monthly webinars.
??? Mark your calendars!
Join us on January 22 for a free webinar sponsored by our friends at Learning A-Z: Think Critically, Write Clearly: Tools for Deepening Student Thought
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