What's the Deal with Morphology? with Sarah Paul
About this Episode:
Sarah Paul is a reading interventionist for kindergarten through third grade. Prior to that, she taught first grade. Sarah has a blog called Sarah's Teaching Snippets that she started in 2010.
Sarah started studying dyslexia about ten years ago, which began her journey with the Science of Reading. She has received OG training through the Dyslexia Training Institute and additional training through PDX Reading Specialist.
In this episode, we’ll chat about:
What is a morpheme?
What is morphology?
Why is morphology important?
How does morphology support reading and spelling acquisition?
When do we start to introduce morphology concepts into our instruction?
Why is important not to wait until the later grades to introduce morphology?
Episode Transcript
Hanna:
Welcome to another exciting episode of the My Literacy Space podcast. Today, I am talking with my friend, Sarah Paul. You can find her over @snippetsbysarah on Instagram. Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah Paul:
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
Hanna:
Why don't you give a little brief introduction about yourself, and maybe pick, I know this is hard to do, one tiny spot right now in literacy that you're really passionate about?
Sarah Paul:
That is a hard question. My name is Sarah Paul, and I'm with the blog Sarah's Teaching Snippets. I've been teaching about 18 years. But about 10 years ago, I got really interested in the Science of Reading, although it wasn't called that at the time, and just started digging in a little bit deeper with literacy. Since then, I've been just sharing my journey and all the things that I've been learning. Right now I'm a reading interventionist for kindergarten through third grade. [Inaudible 00:00:52] my focus right now. It has evolved. When I first started, it was all phonics. I just wanted to learn all of the rules, all of the things and right now I would say it's somewhere [inaudible 00:01:04]. Morphology and fluency have been my big focus, but morphology because I'm seeing how important it is and not that it's totally overlooked, but I always saw it as something we started in fourth grade or third grade. So, that's where I've been a little bit more passionate about. Oh my goodness, this is so important starting in kindergarten.
Hanna:
I'm so glad you said that, because that was one of my questions. What I wanted to ask is, what age is too early? Or not that it's too late, but I think we do have that misunderstanding that we'll just wait until mid-grade levels, or when the words get bigger, then they have to know that. When really we already see a suffix S on the end of so many words in kindergarten. If they go from cat to cats, that's morphology. Why don't you give a good definition of what is a morpheme and what is morphology?
Sarah Paul:
I want to start by talking about... We talk a lot about phonemes, right? Those are the smallest units of sound, but those don't hold any meaning by themselves. They hold meaning when they're put together. So, a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. Think about the word jumped. There are two morphemes. Jump is our base, and then the suffix -ed is another morpheme. You can tack on different suffixes to the word jump and those are both morphemes, and it changes the word slightly. When you can't break the word down anymore, that's the morpheme, so the smallest unit of meaning. And that's part of why it's so important is because as you get into the older grades and you're looking at bigger words, it becomes so much easier to understand a word, decode a word, spell a word when you're breaking it up by its morphemes. And truly, in oral language, we're using it all the time.
Sarah Paul:
The kids know... Think about kindergarten. They're all like, "I'm the fastest." "No, I'm the fastest." They're already using those morphemes. So, why not, as a teacher, make it a conscious thing? Help them to see what they're saying when say faster or fastest. On that level, it can be started in pre-K, even. I think in print though, absolutely first grade they are writing -ed and they're spelling it wrong. They're spelling it with a ‘t’, in some places. Again, jumped, they're spelling it with a ‘t’. I really believe starting it in kindergarten, introducing it in kindergarten, and then really a lot in first grade.
Hanna:
So, why does it then support spelling in the kids' journey even in reading? Because we use them, we see them in print. It's going to impact the meaning of that word. I think it's really important too to point out, I also have lots of parents listening to the podcast. And even thinking of, when we hear our child say, "I haded to go," or something like that, we're looking at those morphemes and thinking about verb tense. We might not call it, "Let's change that morphemes, dear." We might not say it like that, but there are points when, like you're saying, we're hearing it, and then we're going to switch into seeing it in print and us writing it into print. How does it support both reading and spelling acquisition?
Sarah Paul:
So, with reading, at the very least, it helps with decoding and even at just the beginning levels when I'm working particularly with struggling readers. Because if you think about it, our readers that just seemingly naturally learn to read, they're the ones who do pick up on, "Oh, this -ed, I see this, and I'm going to chunk that out." We need to explicitly teach a lot of our readers though. That word is a lot easier to decode if you just cover up that ED, focus on the base word first. Just with those common ones. So, if they know to recognize -ed, -s, -ing, -er, the ones that they're going to see them most in a first-grade text. That's going to help them in the beginning of their journey when they're having to sound out so many words. It just makes it that much easier for decoding.
Sarah Paul:
All right, skip up to third grade, same concept, but you're just using more prefixes and suffixes. The more that they know -con or -ment as a suffix. They know those suffixes, they can chunk it down and they get to the base element, whether it be a base word or a root. So, with decoding, I think it helps throughout. I have a seventh grader with dyslexia. It helps him in science and social studies. We can talk about a root of a word, or if he recognizes common morphemes, it just helps with decoding.
Sarah Paul:
The second thing it helps with reading is with meaning. It builds over their vocabulary, their comprehension. They know what those morphemes mean. That's going to help them with their comprehension overall. So, with reading, it just helps so much. With spelling, again, it helps. Think about the word "comfortable." A-B-L-E, that suffix. It doesn't sound like “able.” Think how you would if you were just using sound-symbol knowledge to spell "comfortable". You probably wouldn't spell it how it is. But if you understand it as C-O-M being the prefix and A-B-L-E being the suffix, and you've taught A-B-L-E and that's one that they've seen a lot. That's something that they can spell a lot easier and you can play with the meaning of that too.
Hanna:
And the confidence that I see when I teach even just the three different ways that you pronounce "ed" on the end of a word is huge for decoding.
Sarah Paul:
Huge.
Hanna:
Because oftentimes, they read it with either the non-voice, like you said, like in jumped, right? They hear it and they automatically put a "T" on the end. If you're saying "We spelled that wrong," what's it [inaudible 00:06:34]. Instead of saying it like that, we can, "Oh, I love that you heard the sound here. I'm going to teach you something and let's stop right here." 'Cause sometimes they just want to add that in before we've explicitly taught it. So, giving them the little heads up, like "You're right. It does sound like a T, but we don't really end our words like that. When we're talking about a verb happening in the past." Go ahead and jump in there.
Sarah Paul:
No, I was just going to say you nailed it. That's why we teach so early, because if we've taught them the sounds of -ed and they're doing it in their spelling, we all know I'm not going to teach it on Tuesday and they're going to apply it Wednesday. It's going to take a while, but I can then say, "Oh, remember the sounds of -ed." I hear a base word in there and "Oh yeah. Oh yeah." That's what happens. I see that happening in first grade. And this is just this beautiful transition that we started to notice by the end of the year they were coming up with it on their own. "Oh no, no base word. And that's -ed." Please just get them in the habit. I think my number one goal is getting them just to recognize when there is a base word and a suffix that comes before being able to spell it. But just that acknowledgment of, "Oh yeah, I hear a base word in there," and that's tricky, but that will help them throughout.
Hanna:
Yep. One of the ways that I start to broaden their ideas of that base word, I'll bring out a Lego base plate, and then I'll say, "Okay, so this is the base. What do I do if I want to make a really cool creation, this beautiful structure? I usually need the base pieces that all the other Lego pieces are going to add onto to make it this spectacular creation. So if this is my base, I can say in English, we also have base words that are the smallest part of the word that hold that biggest meaning.
Hanna:
And we can add things to the front of some of them. We can add things to the back of some of them. We can add things at the beginning and the end, so let's practice." And we'll literally write it on the pieces of Lego to see how those are connecting. And I think like an analogy like that for kids is really strong because it's keeping in their mind that some of them like the prefix -mis cannot stand alone in a word or -tion or some of those, like you said, ment, or -able, they cannot stand alone by themselves. They have to be attached. So then how do we explain what the difference is between a base word and a root word? 'Cause that's different.
Sarah Paul:
Okay. So this is, what's so interesting to me. I have gone to so many trainings and read so much and people have different views on this. So I'm going to share with you the most common definition I've heard is that a base word can stand alone and that a root word cannot stand alone. So a root word and a root word shares an, I can't say this word, etymological, basically history, with some other words. So think about “struct” is a root, not a word by itself. It must have prefixes and suffixes attached to it in order to make a word. And there are tons of words with that root “struct” and they all share that historical origin. So teaching them “struct” and then adding the different prefixes and suffixes on there. They know so many words from that. Whereas a base word, it can be a word on its own or you can add prefixes and suffixes to it. So is that the definition that you've heard too?
Hanna:
Yes. And that's how I'd explain it to my students as well. And for them to... Especially, maybe not... Don't see a ton of those root words early on, we see more of the base words with those common -ed, -ing, -s on the end, things like that. But it's huge as soon as they start getting into textbooks with social studies or science, and they're really honing in on almost some of those tier two, tier three vocabulary words. That's when we see those and it really helps when they're dissecting the word because they can really look for those common patterns and have a little bit of an inkling about what that word could mean because they know one of the parts or as we add on and they have that strong knowledge.
Hanna:
A lot of my students have had some examples of prefixes and suffixes taught in school, but had no idea that those prefixes and suffixes also had meaning so that it changed the base word. So they were just, again it goes back to they were taught to just memorize. Here's a list of prefixes. Here's a list of suffixes. Now you recognize them in a word, but they had no idea that -mis- at the beginning of something has a specific meaning and switches a little bit or adds onto the meaning. So that's really powerful even to help kids understand. That's how we dissect a word and figure out the definition of it.
Sarah Paul:
Huge.
Hanna:
Give us an example, maybe of a quick activity that you would do with kindergarten. Where you would help them understand base word. And maybe let's talk about suffix -s because that's something they're going to see right off the bat. What would you do?
Sarah Paul:
So for suffix -s, something I do is I might get a bunch of books, a bunch of pens, some cups, and I'm going to hold up one book and I'm going to say, "What's this?" "Book." Okay. So then I'm going to hold up three or four books. "Now, what do I have?" "Books." And I'm just going to ask them what changed there, book, books. They probably, at that point will say, "You added S to the end or the sounds. Yes, there's a sound added to book." And then I'll do the pen. I have a pen, I have pens, cup, cups. And afterwards I'll say, "What do they all have in common? What did that sound tell you every single time? That sound told us that there's more than one."
Sarah Paul:
So then I'm going to show them the letter “s.” And they already know the letter “s” but saying it also represents a suffix. That's when I use letter tiles, it's going to be a different color than just the normal consonant S to show them that it's very special. And when you use this purple “s” it carries meaning. And the meaning that it carries is it tells you that there's more than one. So just like when we're talking, and it's a little different, if I say, "I've got some cookies for you," versus "I have a cookie for you." Your brain's going to go, "Sweet. I get more than one." And it's that sound. You hear that sound. And you're aware that I said more than one, and you're going to call me on that, if I just give you one cookie. And then when we see it in print, it's represented by the letter S and I'll go on to show them how it also can make the sound, the talk about the voice and the voice.
Sarah Paul:
And at that point, we've actually already talked about that, but just pointing out that the letter “s”, the suffix -s is representing both the [inaudible 00:13:20], and the [inaudible 00:13:21]. So that's just a way that I might introduce it and that's really conceptual. The other meaning of the suffix S is a little more confusing to understand. So I always start with the plural S.
Hanna:
I love the color coding because I think kids really can start to remember that concept, because it's a little bit, almost like a pneumonic clue for them. It's giving them a little bit of extra. It's not the regular “s” like in the word sit it's added on, but it's we're adding it on for a purpose. And when you were saying the non-voice versus that voice sound word, like listening to, I think some people don't understand when we say that. So here's an example where we'd go, cats has that [inaudible 00:14:01] on the end, but dogs has the [inaudible 00:14:04] on the end of it. And even though it's a letter “s” it's representing both sounds, and sometimes kids need that explicit to show them why is the cats making this? But dogs let's look at what's right in front of it. And is that sound right in front of it is our voice on, or is it voice off?
Hanna:
So those little pieces are great and lots of repetition, because oftentimes we do a quick lesson and we assume that they've got it, and we might do it a couple more times. And then all of a sudden it gets to a book and they're not quite, they will add... Or even in things like they would mistake the voice versus unvoiced sound, because they're almost overgeneralizing the rule. And it hasn't quite clicked yet for them. They know they have to do something, but it's not quite automatic in their memory retrieval. So you were saying, oh, go ahead jump in.
Sarah Paul:
Oh, I was just going to say, you're right about the practice after that, their doing a lot with decoding where you have them with highlighters. Highlight the base words, circle the suffix. Just that really... It seems so basic, but it's not for them. And the more explicit we can be and give them that practice. So they do, or right away, you're going to practice when you see the S at the end of a word to cover it and read the base word, because there are not many words that end with just S there's like bus and has and his, but for the most part, there's an S at the end, it's suffix S.
Hanna:
Exactly. [inaudible 00:15:30]. Right when you're starting, that let's say in kindergarten, do you call it suffix? Do you say the word morphology? 'Cause this is a question I get a lot and I think kids can actually handle a little bit more than we think they can. And so I do say suffix -s for them. You would say that too?
Sarah Paul:
I don't say morphology, but I do say suffix. I say base word and suffix because I don't get into prefixes until later. So I'm just asking them to know those two. And sure they confuse them once in a while, but we can put in our hand motions, the fist is the base word, add two fingers to it, to be the suffix and I love the Legos. Maybe have a bigger Lego piece for the base word and then a smaller one kind of attaching next to it to show that it attaches to it. Just using that language and the more we use it just normally they get it. And it's true they don't get it on day one, or even after a few weeks, they still might be like, if you ask for the base word, they might give you the suffix. You just gently correct them and keep moving on. And the more suffixes they learn, you might have a list of suffixes so that they can kind of look at that and they start to get that language. And I think it's really helpful to use the word suffix.
Hanna:
Yeah, I do too. I do too. Okay. So the earlier, the better that we can start to point it out, especially in speech, because that's going to make a huge carryover into reading and spelling. Why is it important then not to wait until those later grades, like grade four, and grade five, where they start to see it more content, specific words. Why should we input that information early on?
Sarah Paul:
I think just because anything else with, especially our struggling readers, it's already, we get that fourth-grade wall, that third, fourth-grade wall where they get there and they're like, "Oh my goodness, these words are so big." So if we've only taught them to think of a word as sounds. That's asking a lot of them when they get to third and fourth grade and all of a sudden, bam, "Actually we need you to think of words in a different way. And our language is morphophonemic. They both play a role, an equal role. We still do need to of course teach sound symbol awareness. And especially for single-syllable words, it matches up really well. When you get to those multi-syllable words, that's when morphology does take a front seat, so to speak. So why not have it be a staircase? Give them a little in kindergarten, give them more in first grade, and more in second grade.
Sarah Paul:
So then when they do get to those complex roots and there are a lot more suffixes and prefixes to teach that are more complicated. Now they have this background, this great background of okay, for one, I understand the concept. That's huge. And you don't have to start from square one, introducing just the concepts, but also they already know and consciously have that morphological awareness 'cause that's what morphological awareness is just being conscious. Of that fact, that there are morphemes in a word, even if you don't know what the word morpheme is. They're conscious of the fact that there's prefixes, suffixes that can be added on and change a word. That's huge. And if we give them that leg up those third and fourth-grade teachers, I think will thank us because they have a lot. There's a lot of root words. There's a lot of prefixes and suffixes and just giving them that boost, I think is huge.
Hanna:
So I had asked one of my psychologist friends a while ago about that difference. Just some great tips on how we can prompt kids when they come to a word that might be tricky or they read it incorrectly. And now I have to give a little bit of error feedback and a question that I asked him was, "How many sounds can the brain actually hold?" So like when we say "Sound it out," oftentimes what kids do is they go sound by sound and then they try to blend it all together. And he said, "The average brain can really only hold about five or six sounds together and blend them together." So if we are not focusing on some prefixes, suffixes, the base word, those root words, by the time they get to some of those multisyllabic words, that's where they get stuck.
Hanna:
Earlier on, if we can give them other strategies to be able to decode that words and the skills, to be able to figure it out faster in those syllable chunks. And I think even... I've been doing lots of review with my tutoring students in the month of June and really coming back to do they understand the difference between a word, a sentence, a syllable, a consonant, a vowel. If some of those really important pieces so that if I give them a word like flower, "How many syllables does it have? How many sounds does it have? How many letters does it have?" And really seeing if they can automatically come up with that information. I know that they are on a really strong road to be able to figure stuff out because they can tap out a sound for spelling. They can chunk it up, looking at the ER, on the end and the OW in the middle looking at those vowel patterns.
Hanna:
So I thought that was an interesting thing. So I've shifted a little bit, even in the way that when I hear my student pause and I want to say "Quick don't guess. What do you notice about this word? Can you do it sound by sound? Is it a little tiny word or is it more than one vowel? And we're going to have to look at some syllable chunks," and that's shifted even my way in prompting or giving some feedback error. What kind of skills do you think are important so that you could point out instead of just saying, "Sound out that word."
Sarah Paul:
Well I think if you have been teaching prefixes in suffixes, that's... The first thing when you come to a big word, I definitely believe in syllable division and using that as a tool in your toolkit. But sometimes it's easier to look at the morphemes. So if you've been working on these common morphemes, even if it's one that they haven't seen yet, but they know what a prefix is. Let's say they've never seen the prefix -dis, D-I-S. You can point out to them. "You know what? Just like we learned -re, re and retie and reheat. This is a prefix. D-I-S is -dis. Let's cover up that dis." And if there is a suffix like -ed, "Do you see anything else? Any familiar suffixes?"
Sarah Paul:
So likely there is one that they've seen. Okay. So now we can just decode and look at now, you can just sound out what's in the middle and it's going to help them a lot to just see. Oh, and then you might from there do a lesson where maybe you take this and you show them, make a word web of some common words that they would recognize with dis.
Sarah Paul:
And so in that way, now every time it's in a text, they can now know, "Okay. If I do see that, I'm going to just try that. I'm going to see if that helps me." So chunking out any morphemes first, and then maybe doing syllable division, I think helps. 'Cause some words don't have the morphemes like basket. You got to do syllable division. And that's a great tool to teach them, but why not give them all the tools in their tool belt they can have.
Sarah Paul:
And especially if you start young. If you've taught them the whole time, chunk out that -ed, chunk out that -s. It just becomes something that they do and particularly for readers who have a harder time reading, anything that we can help them make that word more manageable and not such an uphill battle. The other thing is often kids with spelling, the syllable division is so great for decoding, but it is hard with spelling because of the schwas, which are the schwa sound is any vowel can make the sound. It is hard. It doesn't always match up. So morphology can sometimes be something that's fun for students who struggle with spelling, because they can see success when it's explicitly taught it. I think they have fun with it. "Oh, wow. Look at all the words you can make."
Hanna:
So this podcast episode today is a little bit of a sneak peek into the Science of Reading Summer Summit that I'm hosting in July. And Sarah I'm so excited that you are going to be one of our presenters, and this is your topic. So you're going to be going into a lot more detail about morphology. So give us a little blurb of what your topic is, and then what people can expect to see in this summit.
Sarah Paul:
What I'll do is, I'll define morphology, talk about why it's important, but then I'm going to start in kindergarten. And I'm going to just step through activities that I do through kindergarten, first grade. And the order I go, because I remember when I first started, I was very much, "Okay. That's what I do to teach -ed." But I was like, "When should I teach it?" So I'm going to go through and be really specific about when I teach it, how I integrate it into my phonics instruction so that it all flows through and then move as I... I spend a lot of time on those earlier years and what it looks like in the classroom and specific activities.
Sarah Paul:
But then I go through what I've been exploring recently, which is what it looks like in second and third grade. Past that is not my expertise, but I am going to go into something called a word matrix, which is created by Pete Bowers. And it's just a really helpful way to study a root and even just a base at a simpler level. So I'll get into that and I'll go over just some general activities that you can use in the classroom for any prefix or suffix.
Hanna:
And I think that's so good because focusing on those earlier years is really going to give those jumpstarts. And I know that for someone like myself as a tutor, if I have a student come in grade four and they're missing some of those pieces. I know that all the information you're going to share will be great activities that I can move quite quickly once they understand. And I love the word matrix, it's such a great graphic organizer piece and kids actually have fun with it, because they're kind of... It's addicting, 'cause you're really trying to find... But what they have to be able to do is have a lot of background knowledge of words. So those readalouds are really important. The vocabulary pieces are really important.
Hanna:
So I really love when we're in this presentation for the summit is that we're really looking back at what evidence is being shown to us through the research at the Science of Reading and then that structured literacy piece where it's explicit, it's systematic, it's cumulative. We're really putting those pieces together. So I cannot wait to listen to your presentation. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. I will see you soon.
Sarah Paul:
Thank you. See you soon.