Morphology

There are many languages in the world and they all have a structure for their concepts. Let’s break apart and put back together what we need to help our learners know about English morphology.

The same steps used to describe phonology are used for morphology: discrete units, categorize the units, classify the units and find the dependencies.

Morphemes: the smallest groupings of letters that give a concept.  Some folks refer to them as the building blocks of words. For example, the word “brick” – you know, the rectangular red things many house and schools are built out of is a single morpheme. But an “s” is also a morpheme since when applied to brick it means more than one.

What’s important: Our learners who can recognize, separate them and then recombine these smaller parts and make connections have a better chance of increasing their vocabulary.

There are two units of morphemes: free and bound.

In the example above, brick, is a free morpheme – it has a meaning all by itself but the ~s is a bound morpheme since it is reliant upon or tied to something else to make sense.

As a general rule, most affixes are bound morphemes. They are added to other words and cannot stand alone.  Here’s where it gets fun; there are two types of affixes (yes – prefix and suffix, but you know about those already).

Inflectional affixes refine the meaning of a word without changing how it behaves in a sentence.  Add an ~s to brick, rabbit or chocolate and you still have the same thing, just more of them (bricks, rabbits, chocolates). 

Derivational affixes change the meaning or the way a word functions in the sentence. Derivational affixes can be prefixes (un+happy) or suffixes (kind+ness).

What’s important:  Helping learners differentiate between morphemes that can stand alone and others that cannot plus how they change, modify or refine a word when they are put together.

There are four groups of morphemes: simple, complex, compound, and compound-complex. Yes, just like types of sentences and they follow similar patterns. Words with one morpheme like brick are simple. When the word uses a free morpheme and a bound morpheme like bricks, it is complex. When the word is a combo of two free morphemes it is compound, ex: hotdog. Finally, when the word contains two free and one or more bound morphemes, it is compound-complex, hotdogs. Look familiar? 

What’s important: Knowing the different grouping units and practicing them with your learners. And make it fun. Metacognitive think-alouds are a great way to help learners practice and work through these four groups. 

These basic patterns are easy.

A bound morpheme must have a friend – a base or root to make sense. Likewise, a prefix must have a friend – a base or root to form a word.

You can add one or more affix to a base or root, but the inflectional suffixes come before the derivational. For example: learners learn+er+s.

What’s important: Practice, practice and more practice. Model metacognitive thinking and reason for students and have them talk it out with you, their classmates and themselves.

Remember: It takes time to teach morphemes, prefixes, suffixes, roots, bases and all the things that get put together to form a word. It takes time, practice, repetition and more practice. It also takes seeing the words in context with other words and helping learners understand the nuances and patterns in forming and taking apart words to make meaning of all those letters on the page.