Morphological Awareness

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Table of Contents

What Is Morphological Awareness?

To understand what morphological awareness is, we must first understand what a morpheme is. A morpheme is a letter or letters that hold meaning. Free morphemes are words that can stand alone like smile or book. Bound morphemes are usually prefixes or suffixes. For instance, the letter s can be a morpheme when it is used as a suffix to make a word plural like hats. 

Morphological awareness is the ability to recognize these meaningful units of speech, analyze them and manipulate them. Visit our post on morphemes to learn techniques that will help your child develop there morphological awareness.

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Why Is This Important?

Morphological awareness contributes to the following:

Decoding:  

Children learn to recognize chunks of letters as a unit along with the meanings. They no longer need to sound out each individual letter of an unknown word which contributes to their fluency. A common example used is the word sleeplessness. This is a long word but morphological awareness allows children to see 3 morphemes: sleep, less, and ness. It assists with accurate and automatic word reading.

Vocabulary:

Morphological awareness allows the reader to understand unknown words. They can analyze a word, pull out the morphemes they already understand, and infer the meaning of the unknown word. For instance, let’s take the word cardiology. This is not a common word for children and therefore would need to be explicitly taught. Morphological awareness allows children to identify the morphemes, cardio and ology. Cardio means heart. Ology means the study of. They can then infer that cardiology means the study of the heart. 

Reading Comprehension: 

Teaching children about roots and affixes allows them to apply that knowledge when reading. It brings meaning to unknown words and contributes to overall comprehension and automatic word recognition. When children can free up mental bandwidth by reading letter chunks instead of sounding out every sound, it frees up their energy for comprehension.

Spelling:

Children hear words such as “jumpt” and understand there are two morphemes, jump and (t). They can recognize that the suffix heard as (t) is spelled as ed because of their morphological awareness.

Reading Enjoyment:

Morphological awareness contributes to effortless reading. When children enjoy reading, they want to read more thereby exposing themselves to new words, ideas, and knowledge. 

Common Morphemes

Morphological awareness is so impactful in literacy. Below are some examples of commonly used affixes that would be a good starting point for your learner. A longer list of the most common morphemes can be found here.

The suffix below makes up 65% of words containing suffixes:

  • -s: more than 1
  • -es: more than 1
  • -ing: the action of or in the process of
  • -ed: past tense
The prefixes below make up 58% of words containing prefixes:
 
  • un-: not
  • re-: again
  • in-: in, into, towards, or inside
  • dis-: not or none

Where is your child on their journey? Would you like more support? Let us know in the comments or reach out to us via our connect page!