Imagine yourself as a student having to learn the meanings of hundreds or thousands of new English words. Traditionally, students were encouraged to keep a word bank – a notebook in which they would write down newly learned words and their meanings. Every so often, the students might refer to the word bank to review what they have learnt previously. While there is nothing wrong with this method, a more productive way to learn new words is through developing morphological awareness. Research has shown that awareness of morphology will improve one’s literacy skills, reading comprehension, and vocabulary (Bowers et al., 2010).
Therefore, as part of the resource development team at the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS), we signed up for a Morphology course delivered by the DAS Academy to develop ourselves professionally both as Educational Therapists and Resource Developers.
Here’s what the team has gained from the learning experience.
Sofia Binte Abdollah
Senior Educational Therapist / Resource Representative & Developer
Even though I am an experienced Educational Therapist who has been in DAS for more than five years, I joined this course to gain knowledge, develop new professional relationships, and become more successful in my project creations. The main objective was to be able to review and supplement my existing knowledge of morphology.
Attending this course has given me an opportunity to meet other participants who share the same interest in morphology. I was inspired by all the meaningful conversations I’ve had with my course participants and lecturers. The course had not only honed my skills in Morphology but also provided me with more ideas and inspiration in improving the Morphology Board Game prototype that is currently being developed.
Further, I was able to integrate the use of Morphology with other areas of literacy instruction into my lessons to develop my students’ morphological knowledge through meaning and spelling connection. Many of these morphologically complex words carry significant meanings to text and are essential to the development of vocabulary. My students would eventually be able to derive word meaning through the reassembling of meaningful parts.
I would also encourage my students to apply their morphological knowledge learnt when writing sentences. One way of incorporating morphology in writing instruction is to prime students with morphologically complex words. With direct instruction when teaching morphology on a word level (i.e., decoding, spelling, and vocabulary), they could then apply their morphological knowledge on a sentence level. Eventually, this sentence-writing activity can be expanded to writing a story summary using different morphologically complex words. This would help to improve their vocabulary especially when they are planning and writing discursive essays.
Aide Memoire
In one of my lessons, the purpose of incorporating Lego blocks into the ‘Vocabulary Sort’ activity allows the involvement of tactile multisensory movements and learning; to get my students to move about with their hands while building their vocabulary knowledge. The students had to match the matching pair of words with the learnt root ‘mot/mob/mov’ and the corresponding meaning, to reassemble the meaningful parts to derive word meaning.
When students go through this process every time to spell unknown morphologically complex words, they should be able to increase significantly the breadth and depth of their vocabulary knowledge.
Lastly, as a resource developer, I have applied the knowledge that I have gained to enhance the Morphology Board Game (prototype) by contributing fresh ideas to make it more than just a resource manipulative for students to use during reviews as well as for them to gain new knowledge and apply it in their work.
In one of my lessons, the purpose of incorporating Lego blocks into the ‘Vocabulary Sort’ activity allows the involvement of tactile multisensory movements and learning; to get my students to move about with their hands while building their vocabulary knowledge. The students had to match the matching pair of words with the learnt root ‘mot/mob/mov’ and the corresponding meaning, to reassemble the meaningful parts to derive word meaning.
When students go through this process every time to spell unknown morphologically complex words, they should be able to increase significantly the breadth and depth of their vocabulary knowledge.
Lastly, as a resource developer, I have applied the knowledge that I have gained to enhance the Morphology Board Game (prototype) by contributing fresh ideas to make it more than just a resource manipulative for students to use during reviews as well as for them to gain new knowledge and apply it in their work.
Soleha Binte Razali – Senior Educational Therapist/ Resource Developer/ Jurong Learning Center Advisor
Since we (the Resource Development Team) were in the midst of developing our morphology board game, we felt the need to brush up on our morphological awareness and knowledge to ensure that the information we include in our board game is not only in line with the essential morphological pedagogy, skills and concepts but also one that caters to our students’ learning needs.
Through this course, I had the opportunity to explore different methods to introduce morphological concepts to my students. Since morphology targets the meaning of words, it is especially useful for my students with Speech & Language Impairment (SLI) or weak receptive language abilities. The course also increased my confidence when introducing morphology to my students. As the profile of my students fits the need for morphological instruction, I believe that I am better equipped to support them. Furthermore, the use of memory aides and multisensory methods also help my students in the classroom.
Additionally, I felt more assured that our team was on the right track with the types of questions and information that we have developed for the board game. We also realised that we have to be more creative in how we present certain morphological concepts. Some of the ideas gained include incorporating memory aides to trigger the memory of the learners or giving tips on how to elicit the right response from the students. The board game also serves as a way for the Educational Therapists to have a better understanding on whether the students have attained a good grasp of the morphological concept or are in need of any reviews and reinforcement.
Therefore, I believe we had definitely benefited a lot from attending the course. It had not only helped us gain a fresh perspective on improving our board game but also enabled us to apply the information and skills acquired in our classroom.
Siti Nadiah bte Mohd Shafie Maskon – Senior Educational Therapist/ Resource Representative & Developer
As we embarked on our Morphology Board Game project, we felt that it would be beneficial for us to gain more knowledge about morphology. Despite having some experience with morphology through teaching it to our students, we sought inspiration beyond the classroom and decided to take on the course on Teaching Morphology to learners with specific learning differences at the DAS Academy.
In my classroom, I have tried various methods to teach morphology to my students. Beyond pen and paper practice, I have incorporated different kinds of activities and games to expose morphological concepts to them. Through trial and error, I got to know which activities worked well and which ones did not, and developing myself professionally in this area has enabled me to gain more ideas and perspectives.
The course introduced me to many other methods that teachers have tried out which I had not thought of before. One of the examples that really inspired me was about a teacher who wrote a song about morphology with her students. This made me realise that I have been letting my students participate in games and activities that I have prepared for them, but I have not given them enough opportunity to be creative. Now, whenever possible, I will encourage my students to come up with funny stories, poems, or riddles using the morphological concepts and words that they have learned so that they get a chance to create something out of those concepts. This allows them to gain more autonomy over their learning in a fun and lighthearted way.
Besides learning from the content of the course, I have learned a lot from the other participants as well. A majority of them were non-DAS staff; they were either parents or private tutors. Since they were not very familiar with morphology, they had asked many great questions which I had not given much thought about due to my familiarity with the concepts. To me, this revealed my blind spots as a teacher trying to put across concepts that are relatively easy to me but definitely not easy for the students. Furthermore, our students tend not to ask questions because they do not know how to verbalise their doubts. Hence, queries from the other participants gave me greater awareness of the questions my students may have in their heads but were not adequately expressed.
Siti Nadiah bte Mohd Shafie Maskon – Senior Educational Therapist/ Resource Representative & Developer
As we embarked on our Morphology Board Game project, we felt that it would be beneficial for us to gain more knowledge about morphology. Despite having some experience with morphology through teaching it to our students, we sought inspiration beyond the classroom and decided to take on the course on Teaching Morphology to learners with specific learning differences at the DAS Academy.
In my classroom, I have tried various methods to teach morphology to my students. Beyond pen and paper practice, I have incorporated different kinds of activities and games to expose morphological concepts to them. Through trial and error, I got to know which activities worked well and which ones did not, and developing myself professionally in this area has enabled me to gain more ideas and perspectives.
The course introduced me to many other methods that teachers have tried out which I had not thought of before. One of the examples that really inspired me was about a teacher who wrote a song about morphology with her students. This made me realise that I have been letting my students participate in games and activities that I have prepared for them, but I have not given them enough opportunity to be creative. Now, whenever possible, I will encourage my students to come up with funny stories, poems, or riddles using the morphological concepts and words that they have learned so that they get a chance to create something out of those concepts. This allows them to gain more autonomy over their learning in a fun and lighthearted way.
Besides learning from the content of the course, I have learned a lot from the other participants as well. A majority of them were non-DAS staff; they were either parents or private tutors. Since they were not very familiar with morphology, they had asked many great questions which I had not given much thought about due to my familiarity with the concepts. To me, this revealed my blind spots as a teacher trying to put across concepts that are relatively easy to me but definitely not easy for the students. Furthermore, our students tend not to ask questions because they do not know how to verbalise their doubts. Hence, queries from the other participants gave me greater awareness of the questions my students may have in their heads but were not adequately expressed.
Janitha Panicker – Senior Educational Therapist/ Resource Developer & Coordinator/ DAI Specialist Tutor
Although Morphology was taught during my training almost a decade ago, the course has certainly been more than just a refresher course. The Morphological system versus the Phonological system has always been an interesting subject for me. So naturally, I wanted to learn more. My objective was to refresh my existing knowledge and acquire new knowledge that I was curious about. It was also a reminder of that day when I was stumped by a question raised by my curious and bright 14-year-old student. He asked me about the odd letters in the word ‘reg – ul – ar’ which were never taught or discussed. “Do they have a meaning, Ms. Jenny? Are they suffixes too?” I was quick enough to share that they are like connectors that help in the ease of pronunciation. A wild guess, then!
Now, I am relieved to know that I wasn’t far from the truth. I learned that the so-called ‘odd letters’ are known as ‘connectives’. Latin-based and Greek-based words have their unique connectives. In the Latin-based word ‘reg-ul-ar’, ‘ul’ is the connective. Likewise, ‘o’ for Greek-based words such as ‘phot –o- graph’. This is the main takeaway from the course. I have since integrated this into the lessons on Morphology for my secondary students.
After the completion of the course, I felt a greater sense of empowerment having been equipped with an expanded knowledge of teaching Morphology using hands-on manipulatives. Activities and aide-memoires (Figure 1 & Figure 2) for teaching our students were widely discussed among the participants. The students can be encouraged to make their aide memoires for learning, recognising, and recalling. The aide memoire is a favourite amongst students as it is multisensory and it instills a sense of ownership in them.
The other activity is word matrix where the older students can build words using the root given with a variety of mix-and-match suffixes and prefixes. They discover how meanings of words change as new words are formed. Another activity I do during every class is Morpheme manipulation which includes substituting, counting morphemes and identifying roots in words. This builds a strong foundation in learning meaningful units in a word to discover its meaning and ease of spelling.
For example, it is easier to remember the morphemes in a long word than the number of letters it has as shown in the example below:
‘antidisestablishmentarianism’
The longest non-scientific word in English, ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ is easier to spell if we remember the 6 morphemes rather than the 28 letters in it.
‘anti/dis/establish/ment/arian/ism’
Furthermore, I learned that morpheme manipulation builds students’ awareness in several areas. Some of these include:
- knowing that the number of morphemes in a word is different from the number of syllables it has although sometimes they may be the same.
- strengthening one’s knowledge in parts of speech (e.g. to be able to identify noun suffixes, verb suffixes, adjective suffixes and, adverb suffixes)
- enhancing and accelerating vocabulary building
In addition to gaining fresh knowledge in teaching Morphology to students, this course was also very relevant in another area of my work. As part of the developer team for the Morphology Board Game, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to incorporate morpheme manipulation questions in the form of a game which would further reinforce the teaching of morphology to our students. To learn morphemes in a fun way would certainly leave a more lasting impression in their minds for easy recognition and recall.
To conclude, the morphology course has been more than beneficial to me. I’ve learnt how to better support my students while increasing my own awareness of the Morphological system.
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves during the Morphology course. We had learnt so much from the lecturers, Siti Mariam and Rebecca Shalinah. They were always more than willing to answer the participants’ queries and tried their best to keep us engaged. Their warm personalities made us feel comfortable to ask questions when we needed to. It was definitely an enjoyable and fruitful course.
Contributed by:
The English Language and Literacy (ELL) Resource Development Team
Sofia Binte Abdollah – Senior Educational Therapist / Resource Representative & Developer
Soleha Binte Razali – Senior Educational Therapist/ Resource Developer/ Jurong Learning Center Advisor
Siti Nadiah bte Mohd Shafie Maskon – Senior Educational Therapist/ Resource Representative & Developer
Janitha Panicker – Senior Educational Therapist/ Resource Developer & Coordinator/ DAI Senior Specialist Tutor
Reference
Bowers, P.N., Kirby, J.R. and Deacon, S.H., 2010. The effects of morphological instruction on literacy skills: A systematic review of the literature. Review of educational research, 80(2), pp.144-179.
