Why morphemes are useful in primary school literacy

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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
Major implicationsOur re s e a rch demonstrates that knowledge of morphemes can help children learning tospell English words, and that it is quite easy to promote this knowledge in pupils in anattractive and interesting way. We have also shown that for the most part teachersthemselves are not explicitly aware of the importance of morphemes, but with the help ofspecial courses can easily incorporate instruction about morphemes into their teaching ofspelling. We have shown that:Figure 2: Helping children think aboutprefixes and how they can give a clue tomeaningFigure 3: Making connections betweensuffixes, prefixes and grammatical categoriesand a game format, used a variety ofoperations, such as adding and subtractingmorphemes, making analogies, countingmorphemes, guessing the meaning ofinvented words made with real morphemesin non-existing combinations, and trying todiscover the grammatical categories towhich words with the same morphemesbelonged. Teachers and pupils enjoyedthese exercises. More than 1,000 childrenwere involved at different stages of theresearch on the development andassessment of the programme. Theprogramme is effective in improvingchildren’s spelling of words whose spellingcannot be predicted from the way theysound. It helps both children in the higherand lower ability groups. The programmealso has positive effects on children’svocabulary and provides them with a wordattack strategy that helps them analyse andinterpret novel words. Its approach iscompatible with current curriculumdemands and extends them in a valuableway.Intervention studies with teachersTo transform our re s e a rch with children intopractice, these techniques need to beadopted by teachers. We did thissuccessfully during the course of this pro j e c t .Teachers were invited to attend a 10-sessioncourse in literacy. This was off e red as aMasters module or a stand-alone unit ofp rofessional development. There were thre emain aspects to the course: an intro d u c t i o n• S c h o o l c h i l d ren on the whole have littlea w a reness of the morphemic structureof words or of the crucial connectionbetween morphemes and spelling• Existing attempts to teach childre nabout morphemes and spelling withinthe NLS are scanty and those attemptsthat are made often do not deal withthe meaning of the words or of theirconstituent morphemes.• C l a s s room instruction aboutmorphemes and spelling does not haveto be boring and can be effective forboth low- and high-achieving pupils.• Teachers who were given theopportunity to reflect on the importanceof morphemes in learning to spell wereable and generally willing to incorporateinstruction about morphemes into theirspelling lessons, and did so with goode ffect.to relevant theories and re s e a rch; thep rovision of the set of materials which wehad created for our work with children; andinvolvement of teachers in the interventionp rocess. Teachers found it challenging tol e a rn about a range of new techniques anduse them in their practice simultaneously butit was the co-ordination of theory andpractice that proved effective in pro m o t i n gtheir pupils’ success.There was little difficulty in increasingteachers’ awareness of morphology. Of the17 teachers for whom we had data at thebeginning and the end of the course, onlythree defined a morpheme fairly accuratelyat the beginning but 16 out of 17 did so atthe end. At the start of the module,teachers tended to consider phonologicalawareness as ‘an essential foundation inthe learning of reading and spelling’, but didnot refer to morphological awareness. Atthe end, they felt that teaching childrenabout morphology also had importantbenefits for 7- to 11-year-olds. All but oneof the teachers reported that the coursehad changed their approaches to teachingspelling. Most mentioned that they wouldteach more explicit morphology, makingconnections between spelling, grammarand meaning. The pupils (n=318) ofteachers attending the course madesignificant gains in spelling compared toT h e re is a strong case for intro d u c i n gsystematic teaching about morphemesinto the school curriculum. Thisteaching should be sustainedt h roughout primary school, includingsimpler examples for the work withyounger pupils and more difficult onesfor the work with older pupils.Teachers can easily recognise howuseful it is to teach the connectionbetween meaning and spelling, andshould be given the opportunity toreflect on it when planning how to teachc h i l d ren about morphemes and spelling.Our classroom interventions provide aframework for the effective teaching ofmorphemes and spelling in schools.The connection between morphemesand spelling should be incorporatedalso into the instruction that pre - s e r v i c eteachers are given about teachingl i t e r a c y.children (346) in similar classroomsreceiving standard instruction. The effectsize of .50 was impressive for a whole-classintervention delivered by teachers who werelearning a technique for the first time. Theintervention is quite a focused and practicalone, despite its conceptual base, and thisprobably contributed to its impact.In the year following the course, one resultclarified the aspect of our intervention thathad affected the children’s spelling. In theautumn term, a teacher who had been onthe course did not have an opportunity touse the morphology materials. During thisterm, her new group of pupils made nogreater gains in spelling than the otherchildren in the same year group. During thespring term she used the morphologymaterials. Her class was compared with aparallel class receiving the same amount ofadditional spelling instruction but differentmaterials. Her morphology group madesignificantly more progress. But additionalcurriculum time was important. Both theseclasses made significant spelling gainscompared to a control class and to theirown progress in the previous term. Theingredients for change in pupils’performance appear to be teacherknowledge and dedicated teacher time withthe appropriate set of materials.Teaching and Learning Research Pro g r a m m ewww.tlrp.org
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