Syllabic Versus Morphemic Analyses: Teaching Multisyllabic Word Reading to Older Struggling Readers

Abstract

The complexities of words in different subject areas increase as students transition from elementary school to middle school. Although most secondary school readers can read monosyllabic words, many other older readers have difficulty with reading multisyllabic words because of their poor phonological and morphological skills. Explicit word‐reading instruction, focused on syllabic and morphemic analyses of multisyllabic words, therefore should be considered for advancing older struggling readers’ word‐reading skills. Results from word‐reading interventions have shown that analyses of syllables and morphemes in multisyllabic words advance older struggling readers’ phonological and morphological skills. Proficiency in recognizing syllables and morphemes in multisyllabic words then promotes older struggling readers’ accurate reading of complex words. Therefore, reading instruction for struggling older readers should focus on using syllable and morpheme analyses for promoting their multisyllabic word reading.

The role of syllables and morphemes in silent reading: An eye-tracking study

“…Masked priming studies have also unveiled facilitatory priming effects for truly suffixed primes (player-PLAY) and pseudo-suffixed primes (mother-MOTH), relative to non-morphological controls (cashew-CASH), with prime displays as brief as 42 ms (e.g., Rastle et al, 2004). This shows that at the early stages of visual word recognition, both suffixed (play + er) and pseudo-suffixed (moth + er) words are swiftly decomposed into their morpho-orthographic constituents (Beyersmann et al, 2016;Diependaele et al, 2009;Longtin et al, 2003;Rastle et al, 2004). These results were consistently found in several orthographies, such as French (e.g., Grainger et al, 1991), English (e.g., Beyersmann et al, 2012), and Russian (e.g., Kazanina et al, 2008).…”

“…Over the past decades, many morphological processing theories have emerged from the field of visual word recognition (Diependaele et al, 2009;Duñabeitia et al, 2007;Grainger et al, 1991;Grainger & Ziegler, 2011;Longtin et al, 2003;Rastle, 2019;Rastle & Davis, 2008;Rastle et al, 2004). These theories make different assumptions with respect to the time-course of morphological processing during reading, with some predicting that the early stages of morphological processing are semantically "blind" (Beyersmann et al, 2016;Longtin et al, 2003;Rastle et al, 2004), whereas others assume that semantics do already assert an influence on morphological processing during the initial stages of complex word recognition (Feldman et al, 2009(Feldman et al, , 2015. However, they all agree that skilled readers are experts at rapidly extracting morphological information from print.…”

“…For example, via access to the individual morphemes in paleo-geo-graph-er , readers may be able to partially derive word meaning, that is, a person (- er ) working in the field of ancient ( paleo -) geography. Thus, compared with syllable-based reading, morpheme-based reading has the advantage of breaking down the word’s meaning into meaningful chunks ( Bhattacharya, 2020 ; Goodwin et al, 2013 ; Kearns & Whaley, 2019 ).…”

Clearing the Clouds: Finding Motivation and Clarity in a Non-Traditional Dissertation Using Arts Based Educational Research (ABER)

“…There has been an explosion of research in regard to the importance of explicit and sustained practice in code-based reading strategies for students with dyslexia. (Bhattacharya, 2020, Hanford, 2020, Kilpatrick, 2015Lewin, 2003;Willis, 2018). The lines of my script that addressed this important (but limited intervention) in high school classrooms were affirmed by my students who struggle with reading because of dyslexia.…”