Morphological Awareness - Benefits for All Students!


In a previous blog I mentioned phonological awareness which is basically 'sound-letter correspondence' awareness. Now we're going to talk about morphological awareness and how it can benefit your Language Arts lessons, regardless of the student group you are teaching!

Let's start with a little history. Morphology is the study of words (basically), so morphological awareness means having awareness of words and how they are related.

 The easiest way to encourage morphological awareness is to introduce cognates into the classroom. Cognates are words that have similar spelling and meaning in two languages. Cognates can help language students make connections between pre-existing knowledge and the new language. 

As you can see, there are many similarities between these words in these Romance languages. You can  clearly see how the words relate and how cognates can really assist language learners.

What a great strategy! But.. what if I teach a language that is more synthetic and unrelated to other languages? (Languages like Korean, perhaps?) In this case, cognates aren't going to work very well for you. In this case, deeper instruction in morphological awareness is necessary. 

 Basically what I am trying to say is you need to teach students the value of morphemes.  Once students are aware of the smallest part of a word, they can use those parts to both build and deconstruct English words. 

 For example, the word unhappy has two morhphemes. 
Un - meaning not 
Happy - meaning joyous

When you place these morphemes together, they create a word with a new meaning. 

Now that we've talked about the basics, let's get to the good stuff. 


Classroom Application


My students at the time I created this were learning at a late grade 2, early grade 3 level of American core standard curriculum and they were faced with a lot of prefixes and suffixes in their reading and vocabulary workbooks, not to mention barraged with dozens of new words daily. 

 I decided to make some graphic posters for my students to use in the classroom (and I even shrunk them down and made them into take home cards), in order to supplement their learning and linguistic development. Understanding affixes (suffixes and prefixes) can help students take an educated guess at what a word means, and they are then more likely to be able to piece together meaning using context clues and pre-existing knowledge. 

Base Words


 We started with learning about base words. Students were encouraged to look at new words and see if there was any part of the word that looked familiar. A specific example from the text was 'joyfully'. I asked them to pick out any parts of the word they knew. A few shouted 'full' and some gave the answer 'joy'. From there, I taught the concept of the base word. 
Students can use this colorful poster to help them analyze words they see in their textbooks or any vocabulary words that are focused on in the lesson. 

Affixes 


After students became comfortable finding base words, we moved onto learning the meanings of prefixes. Luckily this was covered in both our grammar and vocabulary text books. Soon,  they were able to apply their knowledge to new words and gain meaning of context of previously unknown texts. 

And of course, my students are little baby geniuses so once they grasped the concept of prefixes, suffixes weren't too hard to understand! 

 These posters in the classroom helped students to retain the information they'd learned and they also used them to make new words! If they came across a new adjective or verb in class, they'd try out adding prefixes and suffixes to them. 
Colorful and visually stimulating graphic representations of grammatical concepts are the most effective because they engage students on multiple levels, as research has shown. 


Right now you're probably thinking, "Oh my goodness what beautiful graphics and wonderful work.. how can I ever accomplish such wondrous beauty?" :)

 I pooled my extreme google image search talents with my satisfactory Microsoft PowerPoint talents and made these glorious works of art. It took less time than you would think, and now I have specific and effective instruments to use in my classroom that are tailored to my students' needs. 

 If you have more artistic flair and are dedicated to making graphic representations in your classroom, you can check out teacherspayteachers.com and upload some of your work there and maybe make a few bucks while you're at it. Remember, as I said in the last post: You are responsible for being a reflective teacher and letting the world know what works for your students. A lot of teachers can use tips, tricks and a few printables to get them started on the right track! 

 Leave a comment about what kinds of graphics you use to help your students in the classroom! 

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