MORPHOLOGICAL INSTRUCTION IN THE ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM

An idea to consider: Orthography is human thought made visible as text. iii In recent years the role of morphology has gained a great deal of attention regarding research on vocabulary and literacy learning. An attendant literature investigating morphology as a potentially rich context for instructional innovation has grown as well. Chapter 1 of this dissertation presents a critical review of that research. Its focus is on ways that this growing interest in morphology builds on lessons from previous decades of research on the relative effectiveness of instruction which targeted phonological features of words (sub-lexical features) compared to those which targeted learning to read words from context. A detailed description of the linguistic account of how English orthography operates to represent morphology and phonology is also presented. Two studies investigating the role of morphology and morphology instruction in relation to literacy learning and theories of reading are reported. The first study is an intervention usin