MARY BETH CALHOON: Hello, my name is Mary Beth Calhoon. I’m an associate professor at Lehigh University in the area of special education. I’d like to welcome you to the wonderful world of morphology. Today, we are going to talk about morphology and how it applies directly to your classroom. First, I would like to thank Emily Sharp, my doctoral student at Lehigh who helped put this presentation together. Okay, let’s get started. This presentation today is going to cover purposes for teaching morphology, how morphology fits into the curriculum, origins of our language, prefixes: how to teach them, suffixes: how to teach them, and morphology in our content area classrooms. Reasons for teaching morphology. How does morphemic awareness help our student? It helps them in decoding. Readers who recognize morphemes read more quickly and more accurately. It helps them with vocabulary. Knowledge of meaningful word parts expands readers’ vocabulary. It helps them with comprehension. Knowledge of morphemes helps make meaning from text. It helps them also with spelling. Morphemes are units that can be predictably spelled. For example, English spelling is regular 85% of the time if you know the units that make up words. For example, knowing the origin of a word or the meaning of its part helps with spelling and reading. How often have you watched the national champion spelling bee? The student comes up to the microphone, the person says the word, the student sits there for a second, and then the next question out of that student’s mouth is, can you please tell me the word origin? That gives the student so much information on the spelling of the word, and then they’re able to go ahead and spell it. So word origin is something that’s very, very important in spelling. The SAT prep programs teach morphology. It is effective because common academic language is mostly from Latin and Greek. And unless you understand the Latin and Greek origins of words, how those spellings and the vocabulary that comes from it, you get lost in the understanding of how all our words in the English language are built. So also, how does morphology fit into the curriculum? What do we teach and when? Morphology by grade level. First and second grade, what we should be teaching is suffixes and their meanings, the common suffixes: ing, ed. What do they mean and what do they do to a word? You should also teach students at this age level that longer words are made into parts. For example, cats is cat and s, where you have your suffix and your root word. By third through sixth grade, you want to start teaching the most common prefixes and the most common roots and the most common suffixes so that kids can get used to seeing them, understand them, know their meanings, how they work together to form words. Then by the time they’re in middle and high school, you want to start teaching morphology and morphemes that are essential for each of your specific content areas. If you build on the teaching of morphology in this way, by the time they get to middle and high school, they really understand that words are made of parts, they understand what are prefixes, the suffixes, and what a root is. And then you’re able to apply it much better into your content area. So for grades K through 12, we want to always teach about our language, no matter what the subject is. And when teaching meanings of words, we want to talk about the key terms that come along with morphology, such as the term prefix, root word, suffix, word origin, all of those things that have to do and make up morphology, because our whole language is made up of morphology. And when you understand that, you all of a sudden open up for students a whole world of vocabulary understanding, spelling identification, and meaning-­‐based understanding when they’re working within a content area subject. Who should teach morphology? Well, anyone who uses words in their instruction. And yes, that means you teachers of mathematics and of arts and even the PE teachers. You guys use words when you talk to your students. So many of the most commonly misread and misspelled words are from Anglo-­‐Saxon. We’re going to get into that later. So such as words like through and shoulder and listen and iron. Students have a very difficult time reading and writing these words. Math and science words are often made from ancient Greek combining forms, such as geothermo, autonomic, polygon, diagonal. Historical terms and higher level words used in academic writing have Latin origins: century, militia, propulsion, corruption. Art, music, and PE use terms from other languages all the time, such as forte, adagio, ski, lacrosse, fresco, batik. I had to find out what the word batik meant. It’s a form of doing painting on fabric through the use of wax. So no matter what subject you use, you are actually applying the knowledge of morphology and word origin with your students. And the more they understand the background of the words they’re using, the better understanding they’re going to have of vocabulary as a whole and of each of these words specifically. So what understandings should we teach? Teaching morphology is teaching the history of the English language. And it is a fascinating history. English is one of the most amazing languages. Most English words are from Anglo-­‐Saxon, Latin, ancient Greek, and French. We are like the sponge of all languages. English just sucks up all other languages to keep -­‐-­‐ to form itself, and then in this continual formation of what we call English. English also takes in words from other languages and makes them our own, such as canoe, tortilla, tsunami. We speak them and work with them not as if tsunami is a Japanese word, but as if it’s an English word; not as if tortilla is a Spanish word, but as if it’s an English word. We just adopted it. Teaching morphology is teaching the structure of the English language. Words are made up of syllables. Many of our more common multi-­‐syllable words are made up of the prefix, root, and suffix combination. Morphemes are meaningful words, parts that are used as units to add to or change the meanings of words. So now we get to get into the exciting, wonderful world of word origins that pertain to all of our English words. The origins of English. 25% of all of our words come from our Anglo-­‐Saxon friends. The reason this, though, is at the bottom of the pyramid even though it’s not the major amount of our words, is that these 25% of the words are our most frequently used words. We use them more than any other words. 55% of our words come from Latin, 11% from ancient Greek, and 9% from French and other languages. In a way, you can almost tell your kids that when they’re speaking English, they are also speaking French, Greek, Latin, and Anglo-­‐Saxon. So they’re multi-­‐lingual in a way. Not really, but that’s how much our language has sucked up and incorporated and uses all these other languages. So let’s talk about words that are of Anglo-­‐Saxon origin and how you can identify that they’re from Anglo-­‐Saxon origin. Anglo-­‐Saxon is the ancient language that later split into English and German. We are talking about way, way, way ancient language. And then as it started to evolve, it split into the making of English and German. Words from this language have one or more syllables. They’re our common, everyday words. They’re our conjunctions, our prepositions, and our articles. These words often have silent letters such as our silent E, consonant diagraphs such as ph, gh, ch, and silent e, and then they have double vowel spellings. Here’s some examples of Anglo-­‐Saxon words. Knife. We have a silent e spelling and we also have the silent k. Cough, we have a consonant diagraph, the gh, and we have a double vowel spelling. So we know that it’s of Anglo-­‐Saxon. Bread, we again have the double vowel spelling. It’s of Anglo-­‐Saxon. And give, we have a silent e. It’s of Anglo-­‐Saxon origins. Multi-­‐syllable words from Anglo-­‐Saxon are made by compounding words together, such as back, you add two words together, backbone. And it’s going to mean something completely new. You get the word backbone. You have back and bone. They both keep their original meaning, but together they comprise almost a new meaning because you’ve taken back and bone and now it refers to your backbone. So the two words keep their meaning. Now let’s talk about words of Latin origin and how you would identify them. Rome occupied Europe for about 400 years. During this time, French, Spanish, and Italian, which are called the Romance languages, were greatly spoken, and they were influenced by Latin, which was the language of the Romans. So you’re starting to see this overlap here. You have the Anglo-­‐Saxon, you’ve got the Latin coming in, you’ve got French, you’ve got Spanish and Italian, and they’re all mixing together. So multi-­‐syllable words are made by affixing. Affixing is when you either add a prefix to a root word, a suffix to a root word, or you do both of them to the root word. Word parts of Latin origin are also -­‐-­‐ some examples of these are tion, sion, cian, all of those Latinate endings that we work with with students. Latin root words often end in ct or pt. For example, ject, rupt, script, spect, lect, you see that spelling in a word and you know it’s going to be of Latin origin. Also, these words are made by affixing. We take construct, so we have the base word struct and we add con to it. So we’ve added a prefix to it. We know it’s of Latin origin. We have the ct spelling. The same with distraction. We have the tion spelling, we have the ct spelling, we have the prefix of dis. Elect, we have the ct spelling going on. Injection, we have the ct spelling, the tion spelling, the in added onto ject. And erupt is the same with the pt, and respect is the same with the ct spelling. That lets us know that this word is of Latin origin. So let’s use an affix and build a Latin word. A prefix would be pre. This means before. If we add it to fix, which is a root word meaning attach, we get the word prefix, which means add to the beginning of something. Because pre means before, attach. Add attach before. So you’re attaching it to the beginning, hence the engine of the train. If we want to look at the word sub, it’s a prefix meaning under or after. Fix, again, means to attach. We get the word suffix, and that means to add to the end, hence we get the caboose. Some of you might say, well, why do we not have the b? Why is it not subfix? Because what happens when we add some prefixes or suffixes, spellings change so that they’re easier to pronounce and make more sense when we go to say them. So in a lot of our prefixes, you will add -­‐-­‐ you will drop the consonant that comes before another consonant and then double that consonant. But you don’t change the meaning of the prefix. Here we have the prefix re, which means back or again. Ject, which means to throw. You get the word reject, which means to throw back. I reject you, I throw you away, I throw you back. Dis is a prefix meaning opposite or away from. Tract is a root meaning to pull. Tion just means that it’s a noun. Distraction means a thing that pulls away. And we know by a thing we’re calling it a noun. Words of Greek origin, how do we identify them? Greek was spoken by the noble Romans and was used to write many scholarly texts. It used to be thought that if you were of noble blood, you could speak Greek, but the common everyday man did not speak Greek. In the Middle Ages, a lot of the Greek texts were transliterated or translated into other languages. This is where we get the Greek morphemes and their combining forms that can appear anywhere in a word. During transliteration of Greek to English, unique spellings were used that serve as original clues to tell you that they are of a Greek origin. Graph, the ph is used for f. In panic, the suffix ic tells us that it’s from a Greek origin. In chaos, the ch saying k instead of ch means that it’s of Greek origin. In gym, the y within a word stands for i. It’s from the Greeks that we get the y spelling, yet it sounds like an i. Here’s where we can combine these Greek forms and we have the word tele, which means distance; phone, which means sound. We put it together and we get our telephone. We know that telephone is a Greek word that means sound from a great distance. We have auto, which means self; graph, which means written or drawn. We know graph is a Greek word because of the ph saying f sound. Then we get autograph, which means written by himself or by yourself. Another example is archa means ancient. Ic means of or like. We know that ic spelling is of Greek origin, so when we get archaic, we know we’ve got a Greek word that means of an older time. Our French friends, the words that come to us from our Romance language. Starting with the Battle of Hastings in 1066, England was ruled by French-­‐speaking kings for centuries. French words were adopted into English, and the interesting thing about it is that the spellings and pronunciations of these words are retained to this day, which is what makes our spelling and our pronunciation appear to be so out of sync a lot of times. Words from French routinely have unique characteristics. A French word is -­‐-­‐ we know it’s from French if we see that ou. And the i that routinely says e, that’s from French. The que saying k is from French. The French influence on our English words shows up in pronunciations of champagne, touché, and gauche, where the ch is pronounced with a sh sound. It shows up in words like bouquet, antique, and unique, where the qu and the que are pronounced with a k sound. It also shows up in the ou pronounced words, such as cougar, troupe, and youth, where that ou says oo. Then another thing that’s always going to be a dead giveaway for a French word is the i is pronounced as a long e, such as marine and cuisine. Let’s practice identifying the word origin. We just went through all of those identifying characteristics, and let’s see how well you can do. The word tough, what origin do you think it comes from? What is the giveaway of the spelling? Correct, it’s Anglo-­‐Saxon. It’s one syllable. It has a consonant diagraph, gh, and it has a double vowel spelling. Intention is of Latin origin. It’s a multi-­‐
syllable word with the tion on the end. Chicago, what do you think that is? French, because the ch says sh. Chemistry, what do you think that is? It’s ancient Greek because our ch says k, and it’s a science word. And disrespect is Latin. It’s a multi-­‐syllable word and it has that dead giveaway of a ct spelling in the root word. Here’s some more. Let’s try these. Pistachio, where do you think that comes from? Good guess, French. Laugh, Anglo-­‐Saxon because of the base word with the double vowel and the consonant diagraph. Mystic, what’s the dead giveaway in that? It’s the y says that it’s Greek, along with the spelling of ic. Erupting is Latin because we have that dead giveaway again of the pt spelling. Okay, now let’s go to suffixes and how to teach them. In English, the most powerful morphemes are the suffixes, and they have a very important role. Suffixes are used with base words of all origins to indicate number, tense, and part of speech. We should teach suffixes along with their meanings. S and es are the same suffix, and they mean plural or third person singular. For example, the cats play, or the cat plays. Es is used when the base word ends in s, x, z, ch, or ch. For examples, lasses, suffixes, buzzes, matches, and trusses. Er means more than or one who does. She is taller than the other singer. Est means the most. Little Fido has the biggest treat. Tion is a noun-­‐maker. Protection equals -­‐-­‐ I’m sorry, protect plus tion equals protection. Disrupt plus tion equals disruption. Less means without. The hairless cat is fearless. If you teach students the suffix along with its meaning, and with multiple ways of putting it with different words, they start to understand how the suffix is going to change the meaning of the word. Suffixes also indicate part of speech. Suffixes -­‐-­‐ there are certain suffixes that make nouns. For example, er, or, cian, and ist, these make people nouns. You put these on words that indicate people. Sion, tion, ment, and ity, and ile, these are things. You add them onto words that describe thing nouns. These make verbs. Ize and ify will turn a word into a verb. Ly turns a word into an adverb. And ar, ous, ive, al, and ful turn a word into an adjective. When teaching vocabulary, we want to have students use suffixes to make words. We want to have them play around with a word and add as many suffixes to it as they can. A good exercise to do is to provide a word. Now I want all of you out there to come up with as many words as you can off of project, and as many words as you can off of exclaim and create. Just start adding suffixes to those words and think of all of the words that you can come up with. If we look at all the words that we can come up with for project, we have projecting, projected, projection, projector, projectile, projectionist. You can go on and on, and you help students expand their vocabulary with one root word by adding all these different suffixes and how they change the meaning of the word. And it’s really good in expanding their vocabulary. Exclaim, you get exclaims, exclaimed, exclamation, exclaiming, exclaimer, all the different tenses, everything that can go along with that word. Create, you have creates, creator, creating, creation, creative, creativily -­‐-­‐ oh, creatively, sorry. But you can see when you start to have kids do this, they’re going to go on and on and on and on, and just create in a creative way multiple words. Let’s do this again. Here’s your three words. From erupt we can get erupting, erupted, eruption. Convert, you can convert something; it can convert itself; it can be converting, convertible, conversion, converts. Abstract can become abstracts, abstracted, abstractly, abstraction. You can go on and on and on with kids, and they have a lot of fun coming up with these new words. So now prefixes and how do we teach them. In English, prefixes are added to base words and root words to influence meaning. Anglo-­‐Saxon prefixes are used with base words of all origins. For example, undetected, misinterpreted. Prefixes often have a literal and a figurative meaning. For example, forecast means literally to throw to the front. Figuratively, it means to look forward in time. Com and con mean with or together in their Latin origin. You combine them, you compel with force. You construct, means to put together. If you use the prefix ex, which is out and of Latin origin also, you combine it, you get export, you carry out; expel, drive out. Fore, which means front and is an Anglo-­‐Saxon origin, you add that to words and root words, you get forecast, which means to throw one’s view to the front; forehead, front part of your head. For means away or against, comes from Anglo-­‐Saxon. If you forbid, you call against. If you forswear, you vow away from. You should also teach word forms along with their origin and their meaning. Poly, which is of Greek origin and means many, make up the word polygon, meaning many sides, which helps with mathematics; polytheistic, having many gods. You can have the prefixes sym, syn, syl. Those all mean to bring together or together, and it’s from ancient Greek also. This is where you get words like symphony, sounding together; synonym, names together. You should help the students identify the origin of the word form and generate words with it. Let’s use the word or the prefix psych. Psych comes from ancient Greek because we know there’s a y in it and that y makes the I sound. It also has the ch saying the k sound. So the meaning of psych is mind. Words that we can put together and make from the prefix psych: psychology, psychedelic, psychometric. All of these students can put together and then you expand what mind from psych means, you get the study of the mind, the distorting of the mind, the measuring of the mind. Let’s do it again with the prefix re. Re comes from Latin because it’s often used in common multi-­‐syllable words. The meaning of re is back or again. If we make words using the prefix re, we can go on forever and ever using the prefix re, but we can have replicate, which means to make again; reject means to throw back; repel, drive away; repossess, have again or take back. So how would we now teach morphology in specific content area classrooms? So how would you teach morphemes? One way to do it is to introduce them using mini lessons. You can also have students practice them by using -­‐-­‐ by practicing them with homework, do-­‐nows, and/or using exit tickets. Instructional goals for these little mini lessons would be to have students use morphemes to find word meanings and to identify morphemes in words. What would you teach? First off, I’d select the most common and most useful morphemes for your specific content area readings. A good general category of morphemes for content areas are as follows. For mathematics numbers, you would have uni and mono, tri, di, bi, duo, and quadra. If you teach students all of these within mathematics, they’re going to be able to advance their vocabulary, add these morphemes to other words, and create more vocabulary. Inquiry words that we use in science, the morphemes that are really necessary that would really further their vocabulary would be meter, chrono, ology, and neo. If we’re a specific area such as civics or social studies, archae, ruled by; ism, belief or practice; ship, office or job; muni means of the city. If students are taught these specific morphemes and their meanings, you are going to expand their vocabulary. You’re going to help them understand how words are put together and how these morphemes can be used to build additional words. Let’s do some practice ideas. Okay, one thing you can have students do is have a list of words and have them highlight the morphemes in a list of words. You could also have them highlight morphemes in their text to find specific words that you want them to know as vocabulary, and highlight the morphemes within those words. Another thing you could have them do is word analysis with morphemes. You could have them segment the morpheme -­‐-­‐ the word into morpheme parts, and identify each of those parts, and then put the word back together for the full definition of the word. Another thing you can have the students do is research the meaning of the word’s parts used in class. What we’re going to do now is I’m going to show you an example of a mini lesson morphology for fifth grade science class. We’re going to talk about plant in the biology classroom. What the prerequisites for this would be is that students can explain that words are made up of meaningful parts, specifically that there are prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Additionally, students can identify and explain the purpose of a prefix, a suffix, and a root word. For example, that a prefix is added onto the beginning, a suffix is added onto the end. It can change the tense of a word, it can make it a noun, it can make it a pronoun, whatever, so that they do have an understanding of how prefixes and suffixes work. The objectives of this lesson will be that the students will be able to pronounce and define the six key vocabulary words for the lesson. Pronunciation is an important part of vocabulary knowledge and morphology knowledge. If the students can’t pronounce the word correctly, they’re probably not going to read it correctly and they’re probably not going to understand the definition of it. And then, more than likely, they are not going to ever use it in their own sentence or be able to use it productively within the science classroom. We also want them to know and understand the definition of these key vocabulary words. Also, the student will be able to use the morphemes presented in the lesson to aid in defining these key vocabulary terms. So let’s look at some fun ways we might be able to work with morphology. So what we want to do first with the students is review the Greek and Latin layers of English that are used in science. Believe it or not, students really get a kick out of talking about where English comes from and the origins of words, especially if you’re excited about it and you have fun doing it. These are the main morphemes that we would be working with in the science lesson. So we would introduce these to the students. Then we would talk about the idea that, when you’re working with words that are of Latin origin, they have prefixes, root words, and suffixes. Then we’re also going to talk about the idea that words that come from ancient Greek are going to have the spelling of ph, which says f; and ch, which says k. And it’s also going to have y in it that says the i sound. And these are academic words. But if the student will be able to identify the ph, the ch, and the i, they’re going to know that that word is from a Greek origin. One way to do this is to first talk about the idea that we’re going to be studying the process that plants get food from the sun. We know that science words often come from ancient Greek, so let’s look at these words. We have photosynthesis, chlorophyll, organelle, glucose, and chloroplast. Which of these words is from Latin and which is from Greek? Glucose is Latin origin. Organelle is Latin origin. And photosynthesis, chlorophyll, and chloroplast are ancient Greek. These are the parts of the word for our topic today. So what we’re going to do then is take each of these words and break it apart for the students, and have it broken apart plus its definition. For example, photo means light, syn means together, and th means put. So when you put photosynthesis all together, it means light and together, so you’re putting light together to make food. Glucose. Glucose, really we’ve just changed the c to a k, means sweet. This is where we get our idea of sugar. So we use glucose from sugar. So it’s sweet. If we look at the word organelle, organ means part of a living thing. Elle is small. So you have the cell down there, so an organelle is a small part of a living thing. When you start to break apart all of these meanings within a word, the students can have a better idea of the definition as a whole. Chlorophyll is chloros, which means green, and phyll means leaf. So the definition for this would be that you have a green leaf. Chloro again meaning green, and plast meaning forming or growing. So now let’s look at the meanings of these vocabulary words in their full definition. You would put it all back together again for the student. So you have photosynthesis, which is the process by which green plants manufacture food. Sunlight is used by the plant to create glucose. Organelle, a structure in the cell that special -­‐-­‐ with specialized functions. Chloroplast is an organelle found in plants and algae cells where photosynthesis occurs. Chlorophyll, a green pigment in chloroplasts that absorbs light and energy for photosynthesis. And glucose is sugar which is stored in roots and fruits. So we’ve broken apart the definitions for the kids within each of the morphemes of each word, and now we’ve put them all back together within the full definition. A neat little project that you can do is have the students make cards. It would be a nice little homework assignment where on the front of the card is the morpheme, and on the back is the definition. And it’s something that you can go over in class, plus they can take home and study from. And you can use it as flashcards, and this can be done on all of the vocabulary terms for each unit that you’re working on in class. For example, here we have chloro, which means green; organ is part of the body; phyll is a leaf; sugar [inaudible] together; elle, small; photo, light; plast, forming and growing means put. So this way they have a study guide that they’ve created at home. You can work with it in class and they can also study from it. Now then you would then have them practice putting it all together. They would have the cards of the morphemes segmented out with their definition. Then you’re going to have it where they possibly have cards with the whole word on it. So you have synthesis, which means putting it together or making it. Photosynthesis, which means making with light. So photosynthesis means putting it together, making it with light and putting it together. Chlorophyll, the green part of a leaf. Organelle, an organ small enough to be part of a living cell. You can do each of these little parts of morphology one day at a time. It’s not that you have to do all of this together. You could do the cards that have on them the morphemes with the definitions on the back one day. They come in, they’ve studied it, they’ve done it. You work on it and the next night for homework, they can then do the cards where they have the full definition on them. Then you have a quiz at the end of the week. So sugar made by plants using photosynthesis would be glucose. A place in the cell where chlorophyll is made, chloroplast. So you can take about 10 or 15 minutes each day out of your lesson plan to work on the morphology of words and the vocabulary, as opposed to having to spend an entire lesson on it. And that way the student can then gradually learn the definition of these words, the definition of the morphemes, and begin to build their vocabulary. Resources for teaching morphemes. Megawords is a great word study -­‐-­‐ workbook series for kids that are fourth grade and above that has lots and lots and lots of morphology lesson plans and ideas for quick mini lessons in morphology. Also, any spelling and reading book by Louisa Moats and Marcia Henry are going to inform teachers about morphology. And last but not least, the American Heritage Dictionary includes morphological information with each definition. It’s one of the few that does it. It’s going to give you the definition of every morpheme, and it’s going to give you the word origin of all the words. So it’s a very nice and handy reference tool to have in your classroom. Thank you very much for your interest in morphology. And if you have any questions, please feel free to email me at Lehigh University. Thank you very much.