The Language of Reading and Spelling Part 4: Focus on Morphology

Reading, writing, and spelling – it’s about oral language and building the brain for literacy! Success in reading and spelling requires a systematic way of learning, practicing, and applying knowledge about sounds, letters, and meanings of spoken and written words. Whether you’re a classroom teacher new to the study of language structure or a seasoned specialist, this course will provide essential and practical knowledge to deliver word study instruction more effectively.

In this module, we focus on the meanings – the morphology – of words. You’ll become more familiar with written English as a morphophonemic system, acquire a working definition of morphological awareness, examine different models for the development of morphological awareness, and become familiar with different types of morphemes and morphological transparencies and their impact on student learning. You’ll explore how morphological awareness begins to develop relatively early in childhood with at least an implicit awareness of morphology as early as kindergarten and first grade and continues to strengthen over the elementary and later school years. You’ll gain insight into morphological awareness as the sole or strongest predictor for reading and spelling ability and why for all students, including students with language-based learning disabilities, the addition of morphological awareness support is an important instructional component for improving word identification, reading decoding, vocabulary, and reading comprehension throughout the school years. You’ll also explore different ways to assess a student’s morphological awareness so you can deliver tailored instruction and intervention, and you’ll be inspired with specific activities and ideas for instruction that you can immediately put into action to improve comprehension at the word, sentence, and passage levels and to improve spelling of more complex, multimorphemic words to support higher level, more-literate style written compositions.

Through hands-on practice with a variety of words, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the morphological structure of words and gain the insights that will help you more effectively teach your students to read and spell and grow their vocabulary and comprehension skills.

After completing this course, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the morphological structure of words and processes of morphological learning. You’ll advance your working knowledge and skills needed to implement word study instruction more effectively and have a new-found level of confidence in your ability to deliver literacy instruction based on current best practices for developing morphological awareness and knowledge within a multilinguistic model of word study.