Dr. Rob Troyer, Western Oregon University Teacher Noticing Task 1: Proficient use of English morphemes Trouble in Boston Protests like the Liberty affair made British colonial officials nervous. In the summer of 1768, worried customs officers sent word back to Britain that the Colonies were on the brink of rebellion. Parliament responded by sending two regiments of troops to Boston. As angry Bostonians jeered, the newly arrived “redcoats” set up camp right in the center of the city. Many colonists, especially those living in Boston, felt that the British had pushed them too far. First the British had passed a series of laws that violated colonial rights. Now they had sent an army to occupy colonial cities. To make matters worse, the soldiers stationed in Boston acted rudely and sometimes even violently toward the colonists. Mostly poor men, the redcoats earned little pay. Some of them stole goods from local shops or scuffled with boys who taunted them in the streets. The soldiers competed off-hours for jobs that Bostonians wanted. The townspeople’s hatred for the soldiers grew stronger every day. The American Journey (7th & 8th Grade Social Studies Textbook) Chapter 5, Road to Independence (p136-7) Instructional strategies for improving students’ processing of morphemes 1) Select a page from your materials that your students should read independently (about 150 words). 2) Circle the inflectional affixes. 3) Put a box around the derivational affixes. 4) For earlier grades/levels, make a ‘grammar suffix’ chart for only the words in the text: base flower plant plant tall plural -s poss -s flowers plants plant’s verb -ed verb -ing planted planting verb -en verb -s adj –er adj -est taller tallest plants 4) For upper grades/levels, make a ‘word forms’ chart with all forms of the words: Verbs contribute prepare survive Nouns contribution preparation survivor culture method period Adjectives cultural methodical periodical Adverbs culturally methodically periodically Dr. Rob Troyer, Western Oregon University Teacher Noticing Task 2: Proficient use of English prepositional phrases Trouble in Boston Protests like the Liberty affair made British colonial officials nervous. In the summer of 1768, worried customs officers sent word back to Britain that the Colonies were on the brink of rebellion. Parliament responded by sending two regiments of troops to Boston. As angry Bostonians jeered, the newly arrived “redcoats” set up camp right in the center of the city. Many colonists, especially those living in Boston, felt that the British had pushed them too far. First the British had passed a series of laws that violated colonial rights. Now they had sent an army to occupy colonial cities. To make matters worse, the soldiers stationed in Boston acted rudely and sometimes even violently toward the colonists. Mostly poor men, the redcoats earned little pay. Some of them stole goods from local shops or scuffled with boys who taunted them in the streets. The soldiers competed off-hours for jobs that Bostonians wanted. The townspeople’s hatred for the soldiers grew stronger every day. The American Journey (7th & 8th Grade Social Studies Textbook) Chapter 5, Road to Independence (p136-7) Instructional strategies for improving students’ processing of sentences 1) Post charts of the most common prepositions. 2) Give students a photo copy of a complex text that they are studying. 3) Review the form of prepositional phrases (preposition + noun phrase) and two functions. 4) Work as a class, in groups or individually to highlight PPs that modify nouns in one color, and PPs that are sentence modifiers in another color. 5) Discuss any patterns you see. Which prepositions are most common? Which function is more common? Do PPs that modify nouns tend to be embedded more often than PPs that are sentence modifiers? What kinds of information are in PPs? 6) Have students write a summary of the passage by ignoring the PPs. Once students understand that PPs contain “extra” information, they can use this strategy to simplify long, detailed sentences and focus on the “core of the clause”--the head words of the subject and verb. Once students understand the basic principle above, you can apply the same strategy to single-word adverbs, pre-noun modifiers, relative clauses, participle phrases, and appositive phrases.
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