Morphology refers to the study of words and their parts (also known as morphemes).  It involves the understanding that prefixes and suffixes can be added or taken away to change the meaning of a word.  Students need to be taught early that in our English language, “sounding out” is not always sufficient for accurate spelling and word recognition.  For instance, the word “jumped” may sound like a /t/ at the end of the word and could be incorrectly spelt with the letter ‘t’.  However, an understanding of how words can end with suffixes and that ‘ed’ adds meaning to the word “jump” by making it an action that happened in the past, would lead to the correct spelling of the word, “jumped.” 

Reading and spelling words often require both knowledge of phonics, but also an understanding of morphemes.  Understanding morphemes help students with word recognition (decoding) and spelling (encoding) skills by increasing their understanding of how words are structured and connected through spelling and meaning.  The following graphic shows the different types of morphemes that require understanding and often explicit teaching:

(Source: Getting Started with Morphology from Alberta Regional Consortia, 2023).

There are three main types of morphemes in our English language.  Prefixes appear at the beginning of words (e.g., un-, dis-).  Bases are morphemes that give the word the most meaning (e.g., the base in the word reuse is ‘use.’).  Some bases are free bases and do not need to be attached to a suffix or prefix (e.g., rain).  Some bases are bound bases that must be attached to a suffix or prefix (e.g., in the word, con-struct-ed, ‘struct’ is a bound base).   Suffixes appear at the end of words (e.g., -ly, -est, -s).  Some words have only one morpheme, such as tiger or snow.  Some words have more than one morpheme with the addition of prefixes and suffixes (e.g., tiger-s has two morphemes). 

For many students, there are multiple benefits to being taught morphology.  Morphological awareness can increases a student’s vocabulary and understanding of the meaning of words.  It also can enhance a student’s comprehension skills, as well as decoding, spelling, oral reading and phonological skills.  Current research also suggests that although traditionally morphology was taught in more of the intermediate grade level classrooms, it can be taught early along with phonics. 

According to Louisa Moats, 3rd Edition, Speech to Print, 2020: “Recent research indicates that morphological awareness is associated with reading and spelling growth from first grade onward, in parallel with phoneme awareness and general print knowledge” (p. 134).

Morphology Sample Activity:

  • Introducing one morpheme at a time using a general lesson plan for morphology instruction (see blog post from Jan Burkins, Kari Yates and Katie Egan Cunningham, “Developing Word Power: How to Teach Morphology”),
  • teaching with a word matrix,
  • teaching with word sums.

Morphology Resources:

  • Improving Morphemic Awareness, book by Sandra Donah – oral practice of morphemic awareness that can be used for younger students who cannot read or spell yet.
  • Developing Word Power: How to Teach Morphology – great blog article about how to teach morphology but also includes a multi-year morphology plan (scope and sequence). This can be downloaded and includes a general lesson plan for teaching morphology.
  • Bug Club Morphology from Pearson – Kits A, B, C and D with 18 morphological lessons per kit that comes with shared reading texts and review lessons. 
  • Bug Club Morphology One Note curated by C. Yung – Bug Club Morphology

The One Note has black line masters for the lessons in the kit put together by C. Yung, along with information about cataloguing and teaching of the lessons.

  • Mini Matrix Maker – can be used to create word matrix and can challenge students to make words using prefixes, bases and suffixes.
  • Teaching with Word Sums Instructional Videos:

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