An intervention program for teaching children about morphemes in the classroom: Effects on spelling

In the previous chapter, we saw that teaching children about morphemes has a strong and positive effect on their ability to analyze words into morphemes and to spell their suffixes. This seems to apply not only when children are taught on a one-to-one basis or in small groups but also when the teaching is delivered to the whole class. However, in the studies we have discussed so far, the teaching was always delivered by researchers, unaffected by the daily pressures of school life, or by teachers working in close connection with researchers. In this and in the following chapter we will describe a project that assessed how our ideas work when used by teachers in real-life classroom settings and as part of their normal teaching. This chapter concentrates on the effects that the teaching program had on the children's ability to spell