Morphological awareness improves spelling and vocabulary
Professor Terezinha Nunes and Professor Peter Bryant

Professor Terezinha Nunes, Oxford Brookes University, and Professor Peter Bryant, Oxford University, report on the findings of two of their recent projects which assessed how much an awareness of morphology has benefited children's spelling and expanded their vocabularies.

There are many words in English (as in other written languages) whose spellings cannot be predicted from phonology, but are entirely regular if analysed into morphemes. The word 'madness', for example, ends with double 's'; this is entirely predictable from the fixed spelling of the suffix 'ness' but not from phonology. The word 'musician' would be considered highly irregular if we analysed it in terms of letter-sound correspondences, but its spelling is completely regular if we consider that it is formed by 'music' and the suffix 'ian', used to form 'person names' from nouns. Recent research has shown that children's awareness of grammar and morphology is related to their progress in spelling (e.g., Carlisle, 1988; Treiman and Cassar, 1996; Nunes, Bryant and Bindman, 1997).

It is quite easy to see that an awareness of morphology should also benefit the development of children's spoken vocabulary. When they encounter new words that contain more than one morpheme, they could well make a reasonable guess regarding the word's meaning by analysing the word into its separate morphemes, for example, by working out that the words 'lengthen' and 'widen' are verbs to do with changing an object's length or width. Research has also shown that children's awareness of morphology is related to their learning of new vocabulary items (Naigles, 1990).

Considering the importance of these findings, it is surprising that few studies have investigated whether improving children's awareness of morphology has a positive effect on their spelling and on their vocabulary growth. We briefly report here two studies that have considered the impact of developing children's awareness of morphology on spelling and on vocabulary.

Morphology and spelling
Nunes, Bryant and Olsson (2003) developed a 10-lesson intervention, designed to improve children's awareness of morphology. We compared its effects on word reading and spelling to the effects of a phonological intervention of the same length. The programme was delivered by researchers to small groups of children (varying between four and seven per group), who were seen outside the classroom. The children were from a range of abilities and were enrolled in Year 3 and 4 classes (aged seven to 10 years) in schools in London.

The morphological intervention groups, like the phonological intervention groups, made significantly more progress in word reading than children in an unseen comparison group. Only the morphological intervention groups made significantly more progress in spelling target words whose spelling could not be predicted from phonology, but could be predicted from morphology. We concluded that it is possible to have a positive impact on children's word reading and spelling using a programme that develops their morphological awareness.

Morphology and vocabulary
Nunes and Bryant (2002) later developed a new version of this programme to be used by teachers in the classroom. Our aim was to assess whether a morphological intervention can have a positive impact on children's vocabulary. The programme contains a series of activities recorded on a CD, which teachers can easily use. The items in the different tasks are projected onto a screen. These pose questions, which the children are expected to answer sometimes individually, sometimes in pairs or small groups. Discussion of their answers is always encouraged. Feedback is offered on the screen.

The activities were designed to help the children focus on the meaning of the different morphemes and on the fact that they have a fixed form. For example, in one activity the children are introduced to the idea that we can use different suffixes - such as 'er', 'ian' or 'ist' - to form 'person names'. They are then asked to 'name the person who...' and are provided with cues regarding what the person does (reads, plays music, does magic, works in science, etc.). Another activity focuses the children's attention on the suffixes 'less' and 'ful', and asks how attaching these to a word changes its meaning.

All activities engage the children in some form of decision-making: in no task can the children simply respond by producing the same answer over and over again. Different cognitive operations are required in order to strengthen the transfer of the use of morphemes as units of meaning across different tasks. Some tasks use analogies between words, others use counting, addition or deletion of morphemes; others require classification or definition of words. A few tasks used invented words, made with English stems and affixes, which make the play with words fun and aim at the generalisation of the word-attack skills. For example, in one task the children are asked, "What jobs do these people do on Mars?" and are presented with sentences to be March 2004 completed: for example, "He is a spamter; he _______ spaceships for flying too fast." In order to fill in the gap, the children must delete the suffix 'er' to identify the verb and add 's' to inflect it for the present tense, third person singular. Contrary to what many people believe, this word-attack strategy is not too simple for children in primary school.

This programme was tested during 2002 with children of different ages in primary schools in London. Two versions were developed, one for younger children, up to Year 3 (ages seven or eight), and a second for older children, between Years 4 and 6 (aged nine to 12). The teachers who implemented the programme reported that the children enjoyed the tasks and were happy to engage in discussion and learn grammatical terms as they did so.

The children in the intervention group made significantly more progress in a vocabulary test than the children in the control group over the same amount of time (Pretzlik, Nunes, Bryant and Burman, 2003). We conclude that improving children's morphological awareness facilitates the learning of new words. The programme is currently being implemented with a new group of classes for further analyses. We expect to have results relevant both to spelling and vocabulary development by July 2004.

References
P. Bryant, T. Nunes and M. Bindman (1997) Children's understanding of the connection between grammar and spelling. In B. Blachman (ed.) Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia (pp. 219-240), Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
J. Carlisle (1988) Knowledge of derivational morphology and spelling ability in fourth, sixth and eighth graders. Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 9, pp. 247-266.
M. Fayol, M.G. Thevenin, J.P. Jarrousse and C. Totereau (1999) From learning to teaching to learning French written morphology. In T. Nunes (ed.) Learning to Read: An Integrated View from Research and Practice (pp. 43-64), Dordrecht: Kluwer.
L. Naigles (1990) Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language, vol. 17, pp. 357-374.
T. Nunes, P.E. Bryant and M. Bindman (1997) Morphological spelling strategies: developmental stages and processes. Developmental Psychology, vol. 33, pp. 637-649.
T. Nunes and P. Bryant (2002) Discovering the secret of words. A CD for teaching children about morphology, Oxford Brookes University.
T. Nunes, P. Bryant and J.M. Olsson (2003) Learning morphological and phonological spelling rules: an intervention study. Reading and Writing, vol. 7, pp. 298-307.
R. Treiman and M. Cassar (1996) Effects of morphology on children's spelling of final consonant clusters. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 63, pp. 141-170.

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