What is morphology?

Morphology is the study of the smallest units of meaning in a word. These parts or bases are called morphemes. English is a morphophonemic language, which means that it is as influenced by morphemes as much as it is by graphemes or phonics.

Morphemes are the parts of words that convey meaning. There is at least one morpheme in every word. Some word parts can stand alone as a single word, eg play, run, chair (free morphemes). Other word parts only make sense when they are attached to another word part, but provide additional information about the word (bound morphemes), eg the suffix ‘-ed’ makes no sense on its own, but when added to the word played it indicates the past tense. The word ‘teaching’ has two morphemes, ‘teach’ and ‘ing’.

Morphology refers to the study of morphemes and it plays an important role when learning to spell (Joshi et al, 2008; Treiman, 2017).

How does teaching morphology support literacy?

Morphological knowledge enables correct spelling choices to be made, and gives students insights into the way words are built and used.

However, it not only provides students with a reliable spelling strategy, it also helps them work out the meaning of new words. Often, understanding an unknown word can be aided by good knowledge of English morphology.

There are two morphemes in the word ‘antifreeze’. The prefix ‘anti-’ means against or opposite to and the base word is ‘freeze’. The meaning becomes clear – the opposite of freeze is antifreeze. The prefix goes at the beginning of the word and the base holds the meaning of the word.

Breaking words into units of meaning is a powerful strategy for ongoing vocabulary development and word consciousness (Knight, 2024).

Breaking words into morphological units benefits:

• Decoding complicated words more effectively,
• Vocabulary development and knowledge which is essential for strong reading comprehension,
• Word consciousness and building word curiosity;
• Spelling which is about meaning as well as orthography.

Teaching morphology

Knowledge of morphology should be built over time in an age-appropriate way. Starting with the basic concept such as the suffixes ‘-s’ for plurals, – ‘ed’ and ‘-ing’. As students progress they will learn about word roots linking to the origin of a word (etymology).

Maximum benefit from teaching morphology comes through integrating morphology instruction into your literacy teaching. Select words from texts you are reading with your students, link words you explicitly teach the morphology of to your curriculum themes and content areas.

There are some considerations to make when developing your scope and sequence for planning and teaching morphology.

• Begin with transparent morphemes, where the connection between the morphemes is clear and straight forward. This will help your students grasp the concept of morphemes more easily. Once they are confident and comfortable you can move into words where the connections are less obvious due to word origins, historical reasons and evolution.
• Use known bases and build on those. Add a variety of prefixes and suffixes to expand on them.
• Instruction should allow for words to be constructed and deconstructed as soon as possible.
• Teach the most common morphemes before the less common morphemes.
• Include explicit instruction on how morphemes affect word meanings, that morphemes carry meaning and when added to a word affect the word’s meaning.
• Integrate your teaching of morphemes into your reading instruction and vocabulary teaching; avoid teaching them in isolation.
• Include regular review into your lessons, repetition is key for ensuring that the concepts are truly grasped and that your students can use them independently.
• Morphological awareness provides a powerful tool for improving many areas of literacy and is an essential component in using a structured approach to teaching literacy.

Morphology helps us understand word parts and how they work where phonics can’t. It improves decoding of multisyllabic words, builds strong vocabulary, improves reading comprehension and enhances spelling skills.

Where to start teaching morphology?