Led by Dr Danielle Colenbrander from ACU’s Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy, the meta-analysis of 28 studies – drawn from English-speaking countries around the world – found that when teachers broke down words into their meaningful parts there were clear academic gains that followed.
“Our review is the first to show that morphology instruction can lead to improvements in spelling words that have not been directly taught,” Colenbrander said.
“For example, in a spelling lesson, students might learn about the suffix -ly, and they might practice writing the suffix in words such as ‘sadly’ and ‘slowly’.
“But later, a child might be working on a piece of writing, and they might want to write the word ‘loudly’, which they did not practice in their spelling lesson.
“If they use their knowledge of how to spell the suffix -ly to help them correctly spell ‘loudly’, then we would say they have transferred or generalised that knowledge to apply it to words they haven’t seen before in class,” she explained.
‘Complementary’ to phonics
However, the study found little evidence to suggest that morphology instruction lifted children’s reading comprehension skills.
Speaking on this finding, Colenbrander flagged that morphological skills were only one part of the underlying skills and knowledge involved in reading comprehension.
She added that morphology instruction directly complemented phonics in the classroom.
“Knowledge of regular relationships between letters and sounds is important for providing children with a tool for reading and spelling unfamiliar words, and the process of sounding out or decoding helps to build ‘mental dictionaries’ of words that can be read quickly and automatically.”
A good time to introduce morphology alongside phonics instruction is when students begin to come across longer words with more than one morpheme, the expert advised.
“…And after phonics instruction is complete, morphology instruction continues to be useful into the middle and upper grades, as children learn to read and spell increasingly complex words.
“Morphology instruction is therefore another useful tool to help students become fluent readers and writers,” she said.
Introduce at Foundation: experts
The study highlights that although “much debate” surrounds the issue of whether it is appropriate to give morphology instruction to beginner readers, there is evidence to show that it ought to feature in some capacity.
“Considering the morpho-phonemic nature of the English spelling system there are good theoretical reasons to believe that beginning readers should receive at least some degree of instruction in morphology alongside instruction in phonics…” it concluded.
Literacy expert Jocelyn Seamer has previously said that some morphemes can be covered in the first year of school.
“Morphology helps us understand the parts of how words work that phonics can’t. So where does morphology come in? It comes in when phonics stops explaining the why of how words work,” she said in a podcast.
“We can introduce the prefix ‘un’ and the suffixes ‘ing’ and ‘s’ once students know these phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and they can blend words with four or five phonemes.
“It’s entirely reasonable that you’ll be able to introduce these for most children in the Foundation year.”
Light on the detail
The effectiveness and impact of morphology instruction is a murky area in education research, the ACU paper noted, with current evidence suggesting it works but offering “very little clear information regarding for whom it works, under what circumstances, or what features make it effective”.
Interestingly, the study found “tentative” evidence that larger doses of morphology instruction may be more effective than smaller ones.
“However, this finding should be interpreted with caution because ‘more’ is not always ‘better’, and there may be a point of diminishing returns,” it warned.
For teachers looking to introduce morphology instruction into their lessons, Colenbrander advised they can begin by teaching those morphenes that appear the most frequently.
“…for example -ing, the plural -s, and past tense -ed, and then gradually build in other frequently appearing morphemes over time,” she said.
“In addition to explicit instruction in the basics of morphology, children should apply their morphological knowledge in reading and writing activities, and discuss the morphology of words during reading, spelling and vocabulary instruction.”
With “clear gaps” in the literature canvassed, researchers warn carefully designed studies are needed to identify the key ingredients of effective morphology instruction as well as patterns of knowledge transfer and retention.