The Effects of Morphological Instruction on Literacy Skills

Abstract

The authors reviewed all peer-reviewed studies with participants from preschool to Grade 8 for this meta-analysis of morphological interventions. They identified 22 applicable studies. Instructional effects (Cohen’s d) were averaged by linguistic outcome categories (morphological sublexical, nonmorphological sublexical, lexical, and supralexical) and comparison group (experimental group vs. control or experimental group vs. alternative training). The authors investigated the effects of morphological instruction (a) on reading, spelling, vocabulary, and morphological skills, (b) for less able readers versus undifferentiated samples, (c) for younger versus older students, and (d) in combination with instruction of other literacy skills or in isolation. Results indicate that (a) morphological instruction benefits learners, (b) it brings particular benefits for less able readers, (c) it is no less effective for younger students, and (d) it is more effective when combined with other aspects of literacy instruction. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of current educational practice and theory.

Children’s morphological awareness and reading ability

“…Our results also show a unique effect of the Word Analogy scores on reading comprehension beyond its effects on word reading, supporting the arguments of Carlisle (2003) and Kuo and Anderson (2006). These findings suggest both that morphological awareness become a more standard component of early assessment batteries, and that it be the target of instruction (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010;Nunes & Bryant, 2006). The present results also support the need to include morphological awareness within models of reading development.…”

Early development and predictors of morphological awareness: Disentangling the impact of decoding skills and phonological awareness

“…Although gains in the MA of children with literacy difficulties was found to parallel that of typically developing readers, initial deficits were found to remain over time. These results, along with past research that has demonstrated MA's influence on later reading gains (see Deacon and Kirby, 2004) and the effectiveness of MA instruction (for a review see Bowers et al, 2010) strengthens the argument for the need of targeted MA interventions for struggling early readers.…”

“…Intervention studies involving morphological awareness have provided evidence that training in morphological awareness increases reading skill in English (Bowers et al, 2010;Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). Such evidence has demonstrated the potential value of explicit instruction of morphemes to children.…”

“…It has been argued that the learning of such irregularities is best acquired through print exposure rather than through spoken language (Casalis & LouisAlexandre, 2000;Kuo & Anderson, 2006). It may be that complex morphological representations, and an understanding of many derivations only become fully specified through exposure to the written form (Templeton & Scarborough-Franks, 1985) as morphemes are more consistently spelled than they are pronounced (e.g., Bowers & Kirby, 2010). Additionally, it has been estimated that morphologically complex words compose nearly 40% of the new words encountered by children in text (Nagy et al, 1993;Nagy & Anderson, 1984).…”

“…In addition to aiding lexical processing, such segmentation assists in the pronunciation of letter sequences. For instance, segmentation along the morpheme boundary supports the accurate pronunciation of the 'ea' in 'reach', where it is processed as one phoneme, versus the 'ea' in 'react', which is pronounced separately due to its placement in two adjacent morphemes (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010).…”