Ask parents “Do you know what phonics is?” and most of them probably would. However, if you were to ask, “Tell me more about  morphology”, they would be stumped. 

Morphology is the study of morphemes, and morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning in a word. They are broadly categorised into prefixes (eg, un-, re-, pre-), base word or root word (eg, play,  jump, struct, aqua, geo) and suffixes (-ing, -ed, -ment, -ly). Adding prefixes and suffixes to the base word changes the meaning in some ways. Knowing how these are used in our daily language helps demystify spelling difficulties. It also helps our children chunk their reading and spelling into manageable parts instead of having to finger-spell each sound. 

For example: 

Studies (Levesque, Breadmore, & Deacon, 2021) have shown that  developing morphological skills can enhance literacy outcomes, which include word spelling and reading comprehension. 

For example:  

When a child understands that ‘er’ means an ‘agent’, he would be able to put the meanings together and derive that ‘runner’ is a ‘person who runs’ and further derive that this person might love running, depending on the context given.  

This is a transferable and scalable skill.  

For example: 

With this knowledge in mind, if the child encounters a new word ‘poetess’, he would be able to deduce with high accuracy that the new word means ‘a female poet’.  

Granted, there is a long list of prefixes and suffixes, and it may not be possible to explicitly teach all of them. Fluent readers intuitively spot the phonological and morphological patterns. Our children are taught the basic suffixes in school in the initial years, but not much more as they progress. Ironically, morphology becomes increasingly important as words get longer and harder to spell.  

To complicate matters, the spelling of the base word may change when suffixes are added to it. Have you or your child ever wondered why ‘running’ has two‘n’s while ‘baking’ has a missing ‘e’ as compared to its base ‘bake’? How about the presence of ‘y’ in ‘studying’ or the lack of it in ‘studies’ since they have the same  base word ‘study’? Or be confused by ‘striped’ or ‘stripped’, ‘stared’ or ‘starred’? 

Collectively, there are three suffixing rules, which are taught in the early primary years but may not be sufficiently reinforced as the child progresses through primary school. These weaknesses surface in composition writing, editing assessments and even in science. Children are disheartened when their spelling mistakes seem random, and they do not know how to correct them.  

For example: 

These grammar rules not only come in handy when they have to tackle the highly technical parts of their English exams, but also in science.  

For example: Condense, Condensation, Condensing 

When a child has somewhat mastered phonics and basic syllabication of long words, morphology becomes the next important skill to have in the literacy toolkit. Most of English orthography is based on patterns. Morphology is one of those  patterns. While some children can grasp it intuitively, it does not hurt to explicitly include morphology in their learning. Worst case, it bores them; but you may never know. They might be inspired by the beauty of the English language and take their learning to new heights. 

Reference

Levesque, K. C., Breadmore, H., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). How morphology impacts reading and spelling: advancing the role of morphology in models of literacy development. Journal of  Research in Reading, 44: 10–26.