An intervention using morphology to derive word meanings for English language learners
Teaching kids to break words into meaningful parts quickly lifts vocabulary for English learners and generalizes to untaught words.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Davidson et al. (2019) worked with nine English-language learners who struggled with new words.
The team taught the kids to break words into meaningful chunks like un-break-able.
They used a multiple-baseline design and tracked vocabulary quiz scores.
What they found
Eight of the nine students made big, steady gains on taught words.
The kids also figured out untaught words that shared the same chunks.
Scores stayed high when teachers swapped in new passages.
How this fits with other research
Torelli et al. (2023) extends these results to Greek-speaking third and fourth graders in regular classrooms.
Their students also got better at spelling and meaning after the same kind of chunking lessons.
Hawley et al. (2004) used a different method—delayed identity matching—but still showed that part-to-whole training can generalize to new words.
Together, the three studies say teaching word parts works across languages, ages, and lesson formats.
Why it matters
You can add a quick morph warm-up to any reading block. Pick one prefix or suffix, show five examples, then ask students to crack new words on the fly. No extra materials needed, and the boost shows up fast for English learners and native speakers alike.
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Open your next session with a two-minute word-surgery drill: write ‘replay’ on the board, circle ‘re’, ask the kid what it means, then give three new words that start with ‘re’ and have them guess the meaning.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Many English language learners (ELL) experience academic and reading difficulties compared to native English speakers (NES). Lack of vocabulary knowledge is a contributing factor for these difficulties. Teaching students to analyze words into their constituent morphemes (meaningful word units) in order to determine the meaning of words may be an avenue to increase vocabulary knowledge. This study investigated potential benefits of morphological instruction for learning vocabulary words and generalizing taught words to untaught words containing these morphemes. Nine fourth- and fifth-grade ELL with reading difficulties participated in a multiple baseline, single-case design study. Visual analysis of the results revealed a functional relation between the intervention and an increase in participants' vocabulary scores with 90% to 100% nonoverlapping data for eight participants. The effects of training generalized to untaught words. These findings suggest that morphological analysis is a promising approach to increase vocabulary knowledge of ELL.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2019 · doi:10.1002/jaba.539