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Morphology is the study of how words are structured. Many words are made up of smaller units or morphemes such as prefixes and suffixes. These are further divided into freestanding morphemes (i.e. the word consists of exactly one word, such as word itself) and bound morphemes (i.e. the rest of the words that are not considered words independently.) They are then categorized into open class morphemes can change grammatically and semantically by addition or subtraction of a morpheme (include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and derivational affixes) and closed classes that do not adapt to any changes (include pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, determiners, and inflectional suffixes).
Some examples for open class morphemes are: the verb go, transforms into progressive going or past tense went. Milk may transform into milked or milking a cow. Bound morphemes have two classes: inflectional (i.e. ing and ed attached to a verb ending) and derivational (i.e. suffix er), which brings us to Affixes (bound morphemes): prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. Teaching Tips: * One major suggestion for teaching ELLs is to provide them with meaningful lessons in all content areas by showing how these many morpheme categories are used in English vocabulary. * Research has indicated that more words are formed by combining (compound forms and affixed forms) than any other way (blending, or shifting, etc.). For ELLs learning these word parts would be a life saver in terms of vocabulary acquisition. * One way for introducing morphemes to ELLs is to introduce the vocabulary of the unit under study in any subject, by using an anchor chart that includes all those words broken into their morphological parts, base word + suffix or base word + prefix, etc., similar to the graphic on this page (without the extra information). Most educators call this a "front loading activity," since it prepares students to get as much linguistic information as possible before diving into a new topic. Then, as they learn about the science or math lesson, they use, reuse them as a resource and together you can build a strong knowledge base about what the word part means in addition to learning the vocabulary. Over time and with practice students take ownership of this knowledge and will be able to infer meaning using these word parts when they encounter a new vocabulary. |