Why morphemes are useful in primary school literacy

The researchThis TLRP project addresses children'sawareness of morphemes and the benefitsthat awareness of morphemes brings tochildren’s language and literacydevelopment. Morphemes are units ofmeaning that have a fixed spelling inEnglish. There are two types ofmorphemes: stems (or base forms), whichcan often appear on their own, and affixes,which cannot appear on their own. Affixesare added to stems and influence theword’s meaning. The word ‘read’, forexample, has a single morpheme, which isits base form. We add ‘s’ to ‘read’ whenwe are referring to the third person singularof this verb (he reads, she reads). We canalso add the suffix ‘er’ to ‘read’; ‘reader’ isa person who reads. We could add thesuffix ‘able’ and have the adjective‘readable’. To this word we could add theprefix ‘un’ and have the word ‘unreadable’.Children who have a good level ofawareness of morphemes – both stemsand affixes – also have a sound wordattack strategy that can help them withspelling and in developing their vocabulary.Morphemes give an indication of themeaning of words and also have a fixedspelling. Because morphemes arerepresented in spelling, many words thatwould seem to have an unpredictable orirregular spelling can actually be consideredregular. This is the case of the word‘magician’, which is written by adding ‘ian’to ‘magic’, to form a person word, and ofmany other words. For example, the words‘confession’ and ‘magician’ sound exactlythe same in the end but are spelleddifferently. We argued that ‘magician’ isregular: is ‘confession’ irregular then? Theanswer is no: ‘confession’ is written byadding ‘ion’, a suffix used to form abstractnouns, to the word ‘confess’. It is just asregular as ‘magician’.A survey of 7,377 primary school children inYears 5 and 6 in the County of Avon showedthat children do not simply catch the spellingof words like ‘magician’ and ‘electrician’.They cannot tell when word endings thatsound the same – like ‘emotion’ and‘electrician’ – should be spelled with ‘ion’ or‘ian’. Although they used ‘ion’ more often inthe right than in the wrong place (e.g. in‘emotion’ than in ‘electrician’), they also used‘ion’ more often than ‘ian’ when they shouldhave used the suffix ‘ian’ (e.g. ‘electrician’was spelled as ‘electrition’ by 1,812 childre nw h e reas it was spelled correctly by only 785c h i l d ren).Working with several schools in Oxford, weanalysed how children’s awareness ofmorphemes relates to spelling and whetherit is possible to improve children’s spellingby boosting their awareness ofmorphemes. Later, with the participation ofschools in the Hillingdon Cluster ofExcellence, we also analysed whether it ispossible to improve children’s vocabularyand their word attack strategies forinterpreting novel words by boosting theirawareness of morphemes.The teaching of spellingThe project started by documentingwhether and how teachers in Key Stage 2use morphemes in teaching spelling.Analyses of 50 transcribed interviews withteachers about the teaching of spellingshowed that teachers have explicitknowledge of some aspects of morphemesbut not all. The word ‘morpheme’ wasnever spontaneously used, but mostteachers mentioned prefixes and suffixes(82 per cent), and the use of ‘ed’ to changeverbs to past tense (62 per cent). The ‘ed’ending was nearly always associated withits meaning function. However, only 36 percent of teachers (n=18) referred to themeaning of morphemes in other contexts.When they did, it was more likely to be inthe context of a prefix like ‘un’ or ‘pre’ thanof derivational suffixes such as ‘ness’ or‘ion’. The majority talked about morphemesin terms of visual features (‘letter strings’ or‘patterns’). However, the idea of fixed letterstrings cannot help differentiate betweenthe endings of words like ‘confession’ and‘magician’ because these two words bothcontain fixed letter strings. Only a referenceto meaning would help in this case.Each teacher was also observed (and in 46out of 50 cases videotaped) for oneLiteracy Hour. These observationsconfirmed that explicit mention of themeaning function of morphemes was rare.Only three observed events (out of 88) hadsome relationship to morphology and therewas reference to meaning in only two ofthese, both in very specific contexts suchas adding ‘s’ to make a plural. Teachers’explicit knowledge and use of morphemesin teaching reflects the documentation ofthe National Literary Strategy (NLS), andsome aspects of morphemes that are mosttransparent.The use of morphemes in teaching spellinghas not been incorporated much into theNLS. Although a few programmes forteaching spelling, particularly somedeveloped in the US, have suggested that itis important to teach children aboutmorphemes, these programmes haveneither produced methods that appealed toteachers and children nor the evidence toshow that they are effective. It seems‘logical’ that children should be taughtabout morphemes, but our project neededto produce the evidence required by theNLS, by showing that morphemes could beused effectively and acceptably in teachingwithout alienating children or their teachers.Baseline surveysIn order to see whether there is a real needto teach children about morphemes,different surveys were conducted with KeyStage 2 children. Earlier on we referred to amajor survey carried out with more than7,000 children in the County of Avon anddocumented their difficulty with wordsending in ‘ian’ and ‘ion’.We carried out other surveys in Oxford andLondon, as part of this and of previousprojects supported by the ESRC and MRC.These included spellings by more than1,000 children of words with a variety ofmorphemes. A wide age range wascovered, from 6 to 11 years. The surveys allshow that children do not reliably spellwords that are not phonetically regular,even though they are morphemicallyregular. Even when the children know thatcertain letter strings are possible endingsfor words, such as ‘ed’ and ‘ion’, they oftenuse these endings indiscriminately, in theright as well as in the wrong places. Explicitteaching would seem to be the answer tothis problem.Intervention studies with childrenIn order to design an effective interventionprogramme, several small studies werecarried out to test the characteristics oftasks that work.Figure 1: Example of an analogy game thathelped with the distinction between ‘ion’and ‘ian’In one study three groups of childrenreceived the same amount of practice intrying to learn the spelling of words endingin ‘ion’ and ‘ian’. One group was never toldthat these endings are used to formdifferent types of words. They wereexpected to learn the spelling bythemselves, through practice. The secondgroup had the opportunity to try to discoverhow the spelling of the word-endingsworked. They were told the rule half-waythrough the exercises. A third group wastold the rule about ‘ian’ and ‘ion’ suffixes atthe start of the tasks and then had to try touse this information to work out correctspellings. The measures used at pre- andpost-test involved spelling words as well aspseudo-words with ‘ion’ and ‘ian’ endings.Although the children in all three groupssolved the same spelling tasks in the sameorder, only the two groups who were taughtthe rule explicitly showed consistently betterperformance than a comparison group whohad worked on a different literacy task.After these small studies, we designed aprogramme to teach children how toidentify the morphemes that composemulti-morphemic words in order to analysetheir meaning and spell them correctly. Ourmaterials, which were delivered using ITwww.tlrp.orgTeac hi ng and Lear ni ng Resea rch Pro g r a m m e