There are many words that are never explicitly taught to children but they still manage to learn them and they do this with the help of morphology (Carlisle). In language acquisition, morphology can be described as a strategy utilized by children and even adults to discern that meaning of complicated words they do not know by studying their internal structure (Anglin).This strategy consists of morphological analysis in which complicated words are broken into meaning elements that are a part of the whole word, such as its bases, prefixes, and suffixes, which are collectively known as morphemes. Learners are able to get hints to the meaning of words they do not know by synthesizing the meaning of these component morphemes.
According to an estimate, students can work out the meaning of almost 60% of the new, unknown complicated words that they encounter in text by utilizing morphology to understand their structure and their use in sentences (Nagy and Anderson). Morphology has now become recognized as a metalinguistic process and in literature; it has accumulated growing interest as skill that allows learners to learn new words (Scott). In a study, it was investigated to what extent morphology is utilized by children to increase their vocabulary, which in most cases is evidently greater than the number of words that are definitively taught to them (Wysocki and Jenkins). It was discovered that many of the new words that children learned on their own were derivations of words that had already been taught to them. This suggests that children indeed utilize morphological analysis to rapidly increase their knowledge by discerning the meaning of words that are derivations of words they already know (Anglin).
Morphology And Vocabulary Learning Example
When it comes to vocabulary development, teaching morphemes can prove to be quite valuable. A study was conducted to prove this but the evidence turned out to be ambiguous (Pressley, Disney and Anderson 214). Nonetheless, some of the evidence suggested that adults and children who learn morphemes are able to discern the meaning of words much better.
In another study, 7th grade students were taught the meaning of prefixes of a single set of vocabulary words (Graves and Hammond). The use of morphology allowed the students to render those prefixes to come up with new vocabulary words, such as a-blaze, be-calm, be-friend, en-tomb, and more. In another similar study, morphology instruction was used in classroom teaching to teach students the meaning of eight common prefix families (Baumann et al.). The study also involved a group of students that were taught using -morphological context hints, and a control group as well. The group of students that received morphological instruction was able to decipher the meaning of a greater number of words that could be morphologically derived from instructed words than the other two groups.
For instance, if students already know the meaning of morphemes such as ‘un-,’ ‘comfort,’ and ‘-able,’ then they may morphologically derive a new word ‘uncomfortable’ by combining the three, and discern the meaning of this new word. Similarly, if students know the meaning of the words ‘redo’ and ‘unthinkable,’ they may analyze the words into the morphemes ‘re-’ and ‘do,’ and ‘un-,’ ‘think,’ and ‘-able.’ They may then add the prefix ‘re-’ to the word ‘think’ and add the prefix ‘un-’ and the suffix ‘-able’ to the word ‘do’ to derive two new words ‘rethink’ and ‘undoable,’ and discern their meaning accordingly. This somewhat explains how students manage to increase their vocabulary through morphology, analyzing known words into morphemes and combining them to derive new words.
The Importance Of Understanding Morphology
The phonology and morphology of English tend to be particularly interrelated because of which it is referred to as a morphophonemic language (Venezky). It is quite normal for the pronunciation of morphemes to vary from one English word to another. For instance, the pronunciation of ‘do’ changes in its derivative words such as done and does, similarly the pronunciation of ‘sign’ also changes in its derivative words such as design and signal. It is evident that in comparison to learning complicated words individually in isolation, far more new words can be learned through morphological learning (Carlisle). As long as students are able to recognize morphemes within complicated words, they will be able to derive and learn new words. In the English language, there tend to be word families that have tangible meaning elements, and through affixing patterns and consistent compounding, written morphology helps learners to link them.
Explicit morphological instruction that teaches students how morphology works can help children make better use of morphological connections between words that are comparatively transparent so that they may expand their vocabulary on their own. Morphological instruction can also help make children recognize morphological hints when the pronunciation of morphemes changes from one word to another. Although learners who are inherently linguistically savvy may have a better chance of making use of morphological analysis, however, proper morphological instruction can enable any learner to take advantage of it to develop their comprehension, vocabulary, and word reading. It is evident that an understanding of morphology can definitely help learners expanding their vocabulary and reading proficiency, the problem is that morphology has not been properly exploited and only recently have researchers begun investigating its value (Nunes and Bryant).
Works Cited
Anglin, Jeremy M. Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis, Volume 58, Issue 10. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Print.
Baumann, J. F., E. C. Edwards, G. Font, C. A. Tereshinski, E. J. Kame’enui, and S. F. Olejnik. "Teaching morphemic and contextual analysis to fifth-grade students." Reading Research Quarterly. 37 (2002): 150–176. Print.
Carlisle, J. F. "Lexical Processing of Morphologically Complex Words in the Elementary Years."Scientific Studies of Reading. 7 (2003): 239–253. Print.
Carlisle, J. F.. "Fostering morphological processing, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension." Trans. Array Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Reading Comprehension. 1st ed. New York: The Guilford Press, 2006. Print.
Graves, M. F., and Hammond, H. K. "A validated procedure for teaching prefixes and its effect on students’ ability to assign meaning to novel words." Trans. Perspectives on reading research and instruction: Twenty-ninth yearbook of the national reading conference. 29. Washington, DC: National Reading Conference, 1980. Print.
Nunes, Terezinha, & Bryant, Peter. Improving literacy by teaching morphemes. New York: Routlege, 2006. Print.
Pressley, M., Disney, L., and Anderson, K. "Landmark vocabulary instructional research and the vocabulary instructional research that makes sense now." Trans. Array Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Reading Comprehension. 1st ed. New York: The Guilford Press, 2006. Print.
Venezky, Richard L. The American way of spelling. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Print.
Wysocki, K., and J. R. Jenkins. "Deriving word meanings through morphological generalization." Reading Research Quarterly. 22 (1987): 66–81. Print.
