Open the Floodgates with Morphosyntactic Awareness

Action! Language is wrapped around action. A single word -- a verb -- can stand alone as a complete sentence: "Go!"  

In what ways does vocabulary knowledge depend on understanding the basic functions of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs? How does morphological knowledge intersect with knowledge of syntax, grammatical function, or word class? How does vocabulary knowledge, morphological knowledge, and syntactic knowledge support reading comprehension?

In an earlier post I discussed the morphophonemic characteristics of English words, applied to learning to read (see Thunder & Lightning). Today, I discuss another important aspect of literacy: the morphosyntactic nature of English words. Morphosyntactic knowledge has to do with morphology (word formation) and syntax. English words are morphosyntactic because their morphemes -bases, roots, affixes- convey meaning (that's the morph part) while the suffixes in particular convey grammatical information (the syntax part). The final suffix in a word usually conveys whether the word is classified as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb.  For a well-known example, most words ending in the suffix -ly are adverbs, as in quietly, sweetly, loudly...but that is only the beginning. Let's really open wide those metalinguistic floodgates, with the goal of improved comprehension. 💦

VERBS

Latin roots or bases are often verbs. The root COGN denotes the verb 'to know' as in recognize, cognition, incognito, etc.  RUPT conveys 'to burst or break' in words like rupture, eruption, interrupt, corrupt. Likewise, CRED denotes 'to trust, believe' as in credibility, credit, incredulous, etc. 

Psst...The root CRED and its morphological derivatives illustrate the cover of the upcoming 3rd edition of Vocabulary Through Morphemes (Ebbers, in press with Silvereye Learning Resources, who also holds limited copies of the Teacher's Edition).

NOUNS - especially abstract nouns:

When we affix the derivational suffix –ion to the end of a root or word, it generally becomes a noun, as seen when the verb act becomes the noun action. Words that end with the suffix –ion are often abstract nouns; they represent ideas, concepts, feelings, or a process. They are not usually concrete concepts, not easy to see or touch or illustrate. Examples: The root TRACT means ‘to pull’ and it becomes an abstract noun with the suffix -ion: traction, detraction, contraction (an exception is tractor, a concrete noun). Similarly, the root FRACT means ‘to break’ as in the abstract nouns fraction, infraction, refraction. 

Morphological awareness (MA) helps us understand this transformation, at least at an intuitive level, if not with metalinguistic clarity. As we grow in MA, we begin to somewhat subconsciously realize that the invented word *taction would probably be a noun, something to do with the state or quality of showing tact, especially if we had some context to help: An effective diplomat must demonstrate *taction and discretion. 

On the other hand, if MA is not advancing, we may not grasp the noun-forming function of the suffix –ion. This is problematic for vocabulary development and for comprehension. Limited understanding of derivational-suffix morphology is evident in poor readers and writers as described in recent reviews of the literature (Levesque & Deacon; 2022; Liu, Groen, & Cain, 2024). Understanding the role of the suffix is key to understanding language. This becomes even more essential when reading informational texts, because derivational suffixes are ubiquitous to academic words. 

There are more than a dozen derivational suffixes and they all provide information about the word class, helping us decipher the syntactic property of the word. For example, words that end with –ize / -ise tend to be verbs, as in verbalize, fantasize, and exercise. Words that end with –ism tend to be abstract nouns, as in feudalism, pacifism, and capitalism. Words that end with –ive tend to be adjectives, as in creative, expansive, assertive, imaginative... 

The morphophonemic aspects of English words help us learn to read and spell, as discussed in Edview360. However,  morphosyntactic aspects help us understand the word and connect it with other concepts into meaningful sentences and passages. This is where the rubber hits the road for advancing beyond simple into complex texts (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018).

Helping  students develop morphological awareness, including morphosyntactic awareness, is an important aspect of literacy, as discussed quite a bit more thoroughly in the three papers referenced below. 

Check back again next month! Stay tuned for some thoughts on helping students develop word consciousness or word sensitivity,  drawn from correspondence with the ever-curious Andy Biemiller.

Cheers,

Susan

REFERENCES:

Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5–51.  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1529100618772271 

Levesque, K., & Deacon, S. (2022). Clarifying links to literacy: How does morphological awareness support children’s word reading development? Applied Psycholinguistics, 43(3), 921–943. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/article/clarifying-links-to-literacy-how-does-morphological-awareness-support-childrens-word-reading-development/8BA65B23729527F2C3377E7AAF1CC0F9 

Liu, Y., Groen, M. A., & Cain, K. (2024). The association between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in children: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Research Review.

Teaching Reading with Thunder and Lightning

English words are morphophonemic.  

morph + phon 

Let's break that down quickly. 

Phon: Phonemes are discrete sounds within a word such as /k/  /a/  /ch/ in catch.  When learning to read, children study phoneme-grapheme correspondence --the sound associated with a particular letter(s), such as in "a is for apple" as the old saying goes.

Morph: Morphemes are the smallest units of semantic or grammatical information in a language-- prefixes, suffixes, roots, and bases—the smallest meaning-bearing elements, the building blocks of vocabulary. Morphology is the study of word structure or word formation with morphemes -- prefixes, bases or roots, suffixes. Morphological awareness (MA) refers to “the ability to consciously consider and manipulate the smallest units of meaning in spoken and written language, including base words and affixes” (Apel, 2017). 

Some weeks ago in EdView360 I discussed the morphophonemic nature of English words and provided some implications for teaching children to read.  English -- like virtually every language to greater or lesser extent-- is based on morphophonemic word structure.  

If phonemes are thunder, then morphemes are lightning, and they both exist in English words. They both provide vital information to a child learning to read, or a fluent reader striving to comprehend a complex text.  Phoneme-grapheme correspondences are to be clearly taught so these associations are instantaneous and resound in the mind like thunder.  In keeping with this metaphor, morphemes are like lightning in that most of them are more visual, being larger chunkier units. These chunks must also be taught. In written words, morphemes can be colorful, placed in bold format, circled, highlighted, etc. 

mis spell ing     

un fashion able    

pre dict ion s

Morphology is a universal language component, a key aspect of the various human languages, along with phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. The English spelling system is morphophonemic, representing linguistic information about how to pronounce a word (phonemic) and how to determine its meaning and usage (morphemic).  When learning to read beyond the basic beginner stages, children will benefit from both phonics and morphology.

Many teachers capitalize on the morphophonemic nature of the English spelling system in literacy instruction, providing lessons in phonics/ phonemic awareness as well as in morphological awareness. Students who learn both phonics and morphology will hopefully be more likely to quickly access words via two routes: morphological make-up and phonological make-up (Levesque, Breadmore, & Deacon, 2021; Levesque & Deacon, 2022). Not only that, morphological knowledge is strongly associated with reading comprehension (Liu, Groen, & Cain, 2024).

In the Word Families activity below,  children reinforce what they have learned about specific phonetic and morphological units. They have been taught the phoneme-grapheme correspondence for ow (as in now) and ou (as in shout) and then they expand that knowledge further, into morphological word families with ou/ow patterns. In this image the learner has begun to color or highlight words that contain the same base with the same color. (Supercharged Readers curriculum, Voyager Sopris).

When the child has learned enough of the phonics code, while still in primary grades, begin to layer in lessons in word structure. This includes lessons in compound word structure as well as affixation. Teach children about suffixes and prefixes, beginning with the most common affixes. Help children begin to conceptualize words as part of a morphological family of related words, such as sun, sunning, sunned, suns, sunshine, sunny, sunniest, sunnier, sunshade, sunblock, etc.

Make the most of the morphophonemic attributes of the English language.

References 

Apel, K. (2017). Morphological Awareness Development and Assessment: What Do We Know? Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 43(2), 29–34. 

Levesque, K. C., Breadmore, H. L. , & Deacon, S. H. (2021).  How morphology impacts reading and spelling: Advancing the role of morphology in models of literacy development. Journal of Research in Reading, 44(1),10–26. 

Levesque, K., & Deacon, S. (2022). Clarifying links to literacy: How does morphological awareness support children’s word reading development? Applied Psycholinguistics, 43(3), 921–943. 

Liu, Y., Groen, M. A., & Cain, K. (2024). The association between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in children: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Research Review.

Leading for Literacy: A Reading Apprenticeship Approach (Book Review)

Drawing from years of research applied to adolescent literacy, Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and Lynn Murphy have recently distilled their experimental results and methodology into a practical resource. Published in December 2016, LEADING FOR LITERACY: A READING APPRENTICESHIP APPROACH is designed for teachers and students in secondary and tertiary school. The authors describe an approach that facilitates an understanding of complex texts in varied disciplines: history, science, math, literature, etc. They begin with the proposition that disciplinary reading is an essential skill.

From the book:

"DISCIPLINARY READING: The reading that middle school, high school, and college teachers assign day after day in class after class—is foundational to students’ success. For anyone in doubt, new academic standards and workforce expectations make the demand for academic literacy emphatically clear. What is less clear is how to support students to achieve that literacy‐based, future‐oriented success. 

For many if not most administrators, teachers, students, and parents, these new expectations may require a paradigm shift in understanding how learning happens best. This shift includes new ways of thinking about the relationship of literacy to subject area content, students’ and teachers’ roles in learning, and, most important, students’ potential for critical thinking and disciplinary reasoning. Change of this depth cannot spread beyond a few classrooms and is not sustainable without system‐level support. 

The Reading Apprenticeship Framework, developed to promote students’ engaged academic literacy, has a solid history of catalyzing this kind of transformative change—for individuals and within institutions."

A note from Emily Wagner at WestEd's Strategic Literacy Institute: 
Low levels of literacy and the inability of students to read complex texts cause millions of middle and high school students to drop out of school or graduate from high school unprepared for the demands of college and work. The recently released Leading for Literacy, written by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and Lynn Murphy from WestEd’s Strategic Literacy Initiative, is designed to guide superintendents, principals, teacher leaders, and advocates through every step of organizing and promoting a culture of literacy throughout a school or district. 

Leading for Literacy is based on the Reading Apprenticeship approach to learning that broadens teachers’ mindsets about what students are capable of doing, and provides the foundation for apprenticing students to reading, writing, thinking, and speaking in the different disciplines.
 The book features the diverse voices of change agents, including superintendents, principals and teacher leaders. The authors draw upon hundreds of examples and insights, and provide evidence of the applicability of this approach. Along with 42 case study “Close-Ups”—and 43 Team Tools for use in professional development settings, the book offers a rich mix of exposition, rationale, theory, tools, and practice. A companion to the authors’ bestselling Reading for Comprehension (1999, 2012), Leading for Literacy dissects the problems and difficulties as well as presenting successes from different kinds of environments—urban to rural, middle school to college. 

To learn more and dialogue with authors Schoenbach and Greenleaf, register for the webinar Leading for Literacy, March 8th 1:00-2:00 p.m. EST at http://bit.ly/SLI-03-08-17


--------------

My own thoughts:

Having reviewed the book, this method makes sense to me, primarily because it is text-based. Hoorah for that! Students read and discuss the actual text, rather than circumventing the textbook  because it is too complex, too boring, too lengthy, too technical, etc. Rather than merely reading summaries and/or taking notes from a teacher, they read the text. They are taught how to contend with complicated text. This is key. Students and teachers reflect on how they read the text (fluency adjusted for complexity), how they grapple with the vocabulary (including roots and affixes) and how they follow the concepts (comprehension). 

Metacognition is central to this approach, as students reflect on their understanding of the text and on the varied reading processes they used. The metacognitive methods employed in this book encourage students to mark up the margins as they read and to reflect on their understanding, both independently and in groups. They learn to flexibly adjust to the varied texts and writing styles used in different disciplines. Motivation is also integral to this method, including self-efficacy and even interest, to some extent, as a situational interest is sometimes incited by collaborative discussion. Motivation is critical, especially for adolescents struggling to comprehend obscure language and complex concepts. Motivational processes and metacognitive processes are, in some respects, inseparable, as noted in this approach.

In addition, the program makes no pie-in-the-sky promises. In contrast, the authors make it clear that developing literacy across the disciplines will take time (months, even years) and hard work, with a good deal of pre-planning, professional development, and teacher collaboration. This includes vocabulary analysis. This image is from the book Leading for Literacy, page 111. Click the image to enlarge it. This Team Tool is used with teachers in a professional development setting and when they are engaged in lesson design. This tool helps teachers identify obscure vocabulary and plan strategies to promote word learning.

So, I generally like the looks of this book and its Reading Apprenticeship approach. As some of you know, I have taught intervention reading to middle school students and served as a strategic literacy coach to literacy teachers in middle and high school. I found that it was generally easier to teach adolescents how to decode multisyllabic words than it was to teach text-based understanding. It took much longer — and required a very different approach — to develop vocabulary knowledge and to promote comprehension. I was challenged by the enormous task, yet I strove to help students gain the confidence and competence to skillfully use the tools and strategies needed for close reading. I would have been eager to try a program like this one. Once basic decoding / phonics patterns are understood reasonably well, this approach is a logical next step. 

Plus, happily enough, the Reading Apprenticeship method does consistently encourage students to approach new vocabulary through roots and affixes. While the word morphemes is not used in the book, the method clearly encourages students to utilize knowledge of morphemes and innate morphological processing to understand words they encounter while reading. Through this method, I would expect students to deepen their morphological awareness even as they learn to grapple with complex texts. The screenshot from the book, shown below, is only a slice of the student-learning goals the authors developed for each discipline. This screenshot is excerpted from the history goals, but a similar word-analysis goal is seen across disciplines:

This method should augment and consolidate a prior or ongoing supplemental focus on morphology. This apprenticeship method should be effective, especially if students recognize basic decoding patterns, including common phonograms, and have already studied, or are currently learning, the more frequently encountered Greek and Latin roots and affixes. 

I'd give it a go, especially if I had the support of the colleagues in my professional community.

Best regards,

Susan Ebbers

See another post on Disciplinary Literacy by Dr. Zygouris-Coe.

Metalinguistic Awareness, Comprehension, and the Common Core State Standards

Coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center), the Common Core State Standards have swept the nation, and nearly every state has sanctioned the call for students to read more complex texts. In response, publishers are rapidly preparing more challenging texts, referring to the exemplars listed in Appendix B of the Standards, including works by Sophocles, Alexis de Tocqueville and Fyodor Dostoevsky. These types of texts will be Waterloo for some students, and the battle begins in kindergarten with a call to understand—and hopefully enjoy—As I was Going to St. Ives. How can teachers help readers meet this challenge? In part, the solution lies in developing metacognitive insights and abilities—including metalinguistic awareness.

Metalinguistic awareness requires a keener than normal conscious awareness of language. We demonstrate this type of metacognition when we remove language from context in order to reflect on it and manipulate it. Metalinguistic awareness is an important ingredient in learning to read, spell and understand words (Donaldson, 1978). Moreover, as Nagy suggests, it explains a portion of the otherwise unexplained variance in comprehension scores, when other important variables have been controlled (2007). Boosting metalinguistic awareness has significant effect on reading comprehension (Cain, 2007; Zipke, 2007, 2011; Zipke, Ehri, & Cairns, 2009). English Language Learners benefit from metalinguistic awareness, too, including metamorphological awareness (Carlo et al., 2004; Ginsberg, Honda, O’Neil, 2011; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Ramirez, Chen, Geva, & Kiefer, 2010).

Metalinguistic awareness is a cognitive dynamo. At maximum potential, it includes increased awareness of phonemes and syllables and rhymes/rimes, of meaning-bearing morphemes, words, and phrases, of syntax, word referents, and appositives, of denotations, connotations, and lexical ambiguities, of homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms, of slang, dialect, and jargon, of academic language and figurative devices like metaphor, imagery, personification, and more. Writ large, metalinguistic awareness envelops every atom of language.

Researchers have long proclaimed the critical role of phonological awareness (PA) in helping children blend and segment sounds in words. In the past decade, two more types of metalinguistic insight have surfaced repeatedly in reading research journals: morphological awareness (MA) and orthographic awareness (OA). If a student grows in MA, s/he becomes increasingly aware that words sharing the same base or root are similar in form and meaning. For example, the child notices similarities across painted, painter, paintings, painterly, and repaint, at the same time realizing that pain –while somewhat similar in form—is not related to this morphological family. MA also includes knowledge of common suffixes and prefixes.

If a student grows in OA, s/he becomes more aware of the English system of writing, realizing that something “just looks wrong” when presented with “illegal” spellings, such as words beginning with ck or words containing three identical vowels in a row, as in *seeer. As this insight matures, students gradually realize that foreign loan words allow the inclusion of spellings not aligned with English orthography, as in beau, hoi polloi, and faux pas.

Recently, Berninger, Abbott, Nagy, and Carlisle (2010) conducted a longitudinal study spanning first grade to sixth grade in two cohorts (N = 241 students), investigating growth curves for three types of metalinguistic awareness: MA, OA, and PA. They found that PA and receptive OA grew from first to third grade and then tapered off or reached a plateau, for most students. Expressive OA continued to grow a bit after third grade. Meanwhile, MA grew rapidly from first to third grade and then continued to grow, but less rapidly, through sixth grade. Furthermore, MA influenced word knowledge: Vocabulary knowledge was significantly related to how well the student understood that derivational suffixes influence the grammatical category of the word—for example, that instrument is not grammatically the same as instrumentalist or instrumentally, even though there is semantic overlap. Reading comprehension is partially explained by growth in MA (Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006).

As educators, we promote metalinguistic awareness by making explicit the salient aspects of the targeted linguistic concept—for example, the logic behind understanding multiple-meaning words, drawing an inference, or grasping how compound words convey meaning morphologically. We promote keener consciousness when we point out how any detail of language works, making our thoughts transparent in a think-aloud with visual modeling, or when we ask students to explain their reasoning—and we give them feedback. If we exploit metalinguistic insight, we influence word reading, spelling, and vocabulary while moving the ball towards the end goal: comprehension.Thus, we might heed the clarion call of linguist Bill Nagy (2007):

“Vocabulary instruction needs to be more explicitly metalinguistic, that is word consciousness is an obligatory, not an optional, component” (p. 54). 

What about the brave new Common Core? Do they mention the term metalinguistic in the English Language Arts Standards? Alas, no. However, Appendix A circles loosely around the topic (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010):

The reader brings to the act of reading his or her cognitive capabilities (attention, memory, critical analytic ability, inferencing, visualization); motivation (a purpose for reading, interest in the content, self-efficacy as a reader); knowledge (vocabulary and topic knowledge, linguistic and discourse knowledge, knowledge of comprehension strategies); and experiences.

In another section of the document, metacognitive strategies are mentioned. The Standards, and the forthcoming standards-aligned assessments, are fairly agnostic to instructional methods—they do not care HOW we teach—only that students learn. Professional discretion is encouraged; teachers and administrators decide how to address the Standards, including how to develop metacognitive insight, as indicated in Key Design Considerations:

By emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and states to determine how those goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed. Thus, the Standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies [formatting added] that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the Standards.

To my knowledge, the term metacognitive only appears once in the CCSS, in the insert above. By integrating the two excerpts above, one might (might) infer that the National Governors Association did indeed include metalinguistic development in the Common Core. I only wish they had been more deliberate about it.

Without conscious awareness of language, second graders may be frustrated by The Jumblies (another exemplar text, by Edward Lear). Indeed, if lessons do not include an explicit focus on metalinguistic awareness, we could be sending whole schools to sea—in a sieve.

~Susan M. Ebbers

References: 

Berninger, V.W., Abbott, R.D., Nagy, W., & Carlisle, J. (2010). Growth in phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness in grades 1 to 6. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 39, 141–163.

Cain, K. (2007). Syntactic awareness and reading ability: Is there any evidence for a special relationship? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 679-694.

Carlo, M.S., August, D., McLaughlin, B., Snow, C.E., Dressler, C., Lippman, D., Liveley, T. & White, C.E. (2004). Closing the gap: Addressing the vocabulary needs of ELLs in bilingual and mainstream classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 39, 188-215.

Donaldson, M. (1978). Children’s minds. Glasgow: Collins.

Ginsberg, D., Honda, M., & O’Neil, W. (2011). Looking beyond English: Linguistic inquiry for English Language Learners. Language and Linguistics Compass 5/5, 249-264.

Kuo, L-J., & Anderson, R. C. (2006). Morphological awareness and learning to read: A cross-language perspective. Educational Psychologist, 41-3, 161-180.

NGA Center & CCSSO. (2010). The common core state standards for English language arts. Retrieved December 13, 2011 from http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/english-language-arts-standards

Nagy, W.E. (2007). Metalinguistic awareness and the vocabulary-comprehension connection. In R.K. Wagner, A.E Muse, & K.R. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Vocabulary acquisition: Implications for reading comprehension (pp. 52-77). New York: Guilford Press.

Nagy, W., Berninger, V., & Abbott, R. (2006). Contributions of morphology beyond phonology to literacy outcomes of upper elementary and middle school students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 134-147.

Ramirez, G., Chen, X., Geva, E., & Kiefer, H. (2010). Morphological awareness in Spanish-speaking English language learners: Within and cross-language effects on word reading. Reading and Writing, 23(3-4), 337-358.

Zipke, M. (2007). The role of metalinguistic awareness in the reading comprehension of sixth and seventh graders. Reading Psychology, 28(4), 375-396.

Zipke, M. (2011). First graders receive instruction in homonym detection and meaning articulation: The effect of explicit metalinguistic awareness practice on beginning readers. Reading Psychology, 32(4), 349-371.

Zipke, M., Ehri, L. E., & Cairns, H. (2009). Using semantic ambiguity instruction to improve third graders’ metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension: An experimental study. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 300–321.

_________________

Note:  This post was republished in EdView360 and in the CDL Professional Library