Morphology

Words are made up of morphemes: basic meaning-carrying units. Students can be taught to analyze the structure of words using these meaningful word parts – morphology.

Some morphemes can stand alone (e.g., air, water), and these are called free morphemes. Other morphemes can only appear as prefixes, suffixes, or root words (aero as in aerodynamics, ness as in kindness, aud as in audio). These word parts are called bound morphemes. Many bound morphemes occur frequently and are used to change the class of words, e.g., verbs to nouns (-ing, -tion) or adjectives to adverbs (-ly).

Common morphemes are powerful helpers.

Reading researchers have found that teaching students to recognize the various elements of a word is a highly effective means of expanding their vocabularies. If we talk specifically about the structure of words, we can help students see their morphological structures, and figure out how prefixes and suffixes change the meanings of roots.

Students can learn new words more quickly by focusing on just a few common roots, prefixes, and suffixes. These smaller word chunks can become a “toolbox” to help students understand the meanings of less familiar words.”