The Oklahoma Reader V55 N2 Fall 2019

Morphological Instruction: A Support for Developing Reading Comprehension

Editor’s Note: The International Literacy Association’s website has archived a series of podcasts with authors of articles that have been published in Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ). One of those featured articles is reviewed in this column, along with a related article from The Reading Teacher. The podcasts can be found at this site: https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/19362722/homepage/rrqauthorinterviews

The following articles are included in this research summary: Levesque, K.C., Kieffer, M.J., & Deacon, S.H. (2018). Inferring meaning from

meaningful parts: The contributions of morphological skills to the development of children’s reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 54, 63-80. doi:10.1002.rrq/219

Manyak, P.C., Baumann, J.F., & Manyak, A-M. (2018). Morphological analysis

instruction in the elementary grades: Which morphemes to teach and how to teach them. The Reading Teacher, 72, 289-300. doi:10.1002/trtr.1713

Teachers are committed to helping students become successful, engaged readers. We understand that there are many components that contribute to the developmental process, including those famous “five elements” identified in the Report of the National Reading Panel (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) (2000). Beyond those five elements, many other factors are part of the process. My own experience as a reading specialist working with children in upper elementary and middle school makes me very conscious of challenges as children move beyond simple phonics patterns to trying to decode multiple-syllable words. Therefore, I was intrigued by a recent study in RRQ.

Inferring meaning from meaningful parts helps children notice and use morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in the words they encounter in their reading. The research study from RRQ analyzed two related concepts and the ways that they impact reading comprehension. Morphological awareness refers to the awareness of, and ability to, manipulate morphemes. Morphological analysis refers to the use of morphemes to understand the meanings of unfamiliar multiple-syllable words. The research study analyzed these two types of using morphemes, as well as their relation to reading comprehension. This research study was a longitudinal study conducted over two years with children while they were in third and fourth grades. Two research questions were addressed. First, researchers tested morphological awareness and morphological analysis as possible unique predictors of gains in reading comprehension from grade 3 to grade 4. The second question analyzed the relation between morphological awareness and morphological analysis. In addition, the researchers assessed students’ reading comprehension, with controls for word reading, vocabulary, phonological awareness, nonverbal ability, and age.

Participants in the study were children from 14 elementary schools. The participant sample included 197 children (91 boys and 106 girls) who averaged 8 years, 10 months at the beginning of the study. The participants were mainly Caucasian, consistent with the population of the school locations. All of the participants spoke English as their first language. They were mainly from middle to upper middle class families, based on income.

Researchers administered two spoken measures of morphological awareness at each grade. One was a test of morphological awareness where participants were asked to change a target item to complete a sentence (farm: My uncle is a [farmer]). Half of the 28 items were phonologically transparent (accept…acceptance), and half were phonologically opaque (revise…revision). Half of the items asked the children to produce a derived word from a base (farm…farmer), while half involved the decomposition of a derived form to its base form (growth…grow).

The second measure of morphological awareness was a word analogy task which assessed participants’ awareness of morphological changes in a set of words that followed an analogy (A:B::C:D). Participants heard the first pair of words, followed by the first word of the second pair, then they were asked to complete the analogy (run:ran::walk, walked). There were 20 test items, with equal numbers of inflected and derived words, both of which included phonologically transparent (walk…walked) and phonologically opaque transformations (stood…stand).

Next, the researchers administered a morphological analysis task which was presented orally by the experimenter and was provided in print to the participants. Each morphologically complex word was presented in a multiple-choice format with the correct response being a higher-frequency synonym or a paraphrase that captured the meaning of the base word and the suffix. Other assessments were given for reading comprehension (Gates-MacGinite Reading Tests), phonological awareness (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing), nonverbal ability (Matrix Reasoning subtest of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence), word reading (Test of Word Reading Efficiency, including subtests for real English words and for pronounceable nonwords), and vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). Multivariate autoregressive path analysis carefully examined the results. The research results described a developmental trajectory. Increased success with morphological awareness predicted success with morphological analysis. This sequence, in turn, predicted gains in reading comprehension. Because of the influence of morphological instruction on students’ reading comprehension, strategies for supporting morphological skills will be important for classroom instruction.

Teachers who are supporting children in developing these morphological skills can find ideas to use in their classrooms in the Reading Teacher article. This study focused on instruction in morphological analysis. It followed several earlier studies by members of the research team. The current study was part of the Vocabulary and Language Enhancement (VALE) project in a third-grade class to develop a multidimensional approach to teaching affixes.

The instruction is focused on teaching students the meanings of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and of word roots and a strategy for using knowledge of these morphemic elements to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words. Extensive earlier research was cited for the identification of three principles about teaching affixes:

• Instruction in word parts contributes to word reading and enhances students’ ability to infer word meanings. • Morphological awareness instruction should include: (1) awareness of the morphological structure of words, (2) meanings of specific affixes and root words, (3) analysis of how a word’s morphemes contribute to its meaning, grammatical function, or spelling (4) strategies for using morphologicalanalysis to infer word meanings (p. 290). • Affixes and base words differ in being semantically transparent (dishonest) in comparison to words that are less transparent (discard). In addition to other insights from previous research, the researchers worked to balance explicit instruction and highly participatory activities, foster student engagement, prompt students to engage in metalinguistic talk, and provide ongoing review of taught meanings and strategies.

For the instruction in the VALE project, affixes were chosen that met a strict definition of prefix or suffix (must be attached to a base word, such as dislike, unfair, hopeless, and teacher, in contrast to words that have absorbed or assimilated prefixes such as accept or erase). Affixes were chosen that have consistent, concrete meanings such as the prefix dis- that consistently means “not” or the suffix –ful that consistently means “full of”. Affixes were chosen that have the highest frequency, and they were organized into semantic groups with similar meanings. In the third-grade classroom, four activities constituted the multidimensional VALE affix instruction. Each week, the teacher provided explicit instruction for one of the prefix families and a word-part strategy, followed by three extension and review activities.

The article described ideas for explicit instruction in affixes and the word-part strategies, including large charts (to display word parts) and PowerPoint lessons. One example of the interactive activities included the third-grade students holding a card with a word that shared prefixes and suffixes with words on their peers’ cards. The children found peers whose words share the same base word (redo, doable, overdo, undoable), then sat down together to talk about the words and work out the meanings.

Instruction followed a sequence described below, where an example was given for teaching the “not” prefix family. 1. Introduction: show a chart of three prefixes that mean “not” (dis-, un-, in-) 2. Analyze words: explain that when a word has these prefixes, say “not” inplace of the prefix (when you see unhappy, say not happy) 3. Examine affixed and pseudo-affixed words and talk about what makes sense (discuss the difference between unhappy, which means “not happy” and uncle, which doesn’t make sense as “not cle”) 4. Practice building words (show a column of prefixes and a column of base words and ask students to build specific words (build a word that means “not kind”) 5. Quiz: ask students to fill in the blank with a word that combines a prefix and base words to make sense in a sentence. (The moment I broke the dishes, I wished I could . [disappear]} 6. Collection challenge: challenge students to find words that include the target affixes and add them to a wall chart, with the incentive that when they have

added a certain number of words to the chart, the class will play a game of Affix Jeopardy. The Jeopardy games reviewed previously taught affixes. Columns of clues were displayed on an Affix Jeopardy Board, with items at the bottom of the board earning lower points than the top of the board. For example, the columns might include “Not” prefixes (dis- , un-, in-, im-, non, il-, ir-), “place” prefixes (pre-, post, mid-, inter-, intra-, trans-), other useful prefixes, or sentences where the child would need to supply a word to fill in a blank. The children were in small-group teams, and the teacher called on a student to respond. If a team did not answer correctly, other teams had a chance to respond. To assess the morphemic analysis instruction, the research team constructed the Morphemic Analysis Assessment, a 53 item test that assessed students’ ability to segment words into individual morphemes, match taught affixes and roots to the meanings, and select the best meanings for low-frequency affixed words not included in the lessons. A 42 item version of the original test was administered at the end. All of the students, regardless of their initial performance, responded positively to the affix instruction. Qualitative observations of the morphological analysis instruction documented consistently high student engagement in the lessons, a sophisticated level of student discourse related to word parts and their meanings, and students’ enthusiasm for locating words that included the taught affixes. The article included ideas for introducing the process with children younger than third grade, as well as for helping older children with guided practice in using the wordpart strategy to infer word meanings. This type of instruction will be especially helpful as the number of morphologically complex words increases in the texts that students read. Ultimately, reading comprehension will be supported, and that is the ultimate goal for what we do!

Dr. Linda McElroy is a professor at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. She previously taught in Oklahoma schools as a classroom teacher and as a reading specialist.