Morphemes and literacy: Context and conclusions

In this final chapter, we shall write about our findings in the context of current theory and practice in the teaching of spelling. When we began our research on teaching children about morphemes and spelling (the research that we have described in Chapters 3-6 of this book), we already knew that there was a strong and important connection between children's knowledge of morphemes and their understanding and use of the English spelling system. Our previous work and the work of several other researchers (described in Chapters 1 and 2) had led us to three main conclusions about this connection. We thought that these conclusions were clear and convincing enough for us to use them as starting points for an educational research program about how best to promote children's morphemic knowledge in the classroom in order to help them to master the English spelling system and vocabulary. Our three starting points were: 1. Some of the most important correspondences between spoken and written language are at the level of the morpheme. The morphemic structure of words in English, and in several other orthographies, often determines their spelling. The system of morphemes, therefore, is a powerful resource for those learning literacy: The more schoolchildren know about morphemes, the more likely it is that they will learn about spelling principles based on morphemes. 2. Children's knowledge of morphemes is largely implicit. The connection between this implicit knowledge and children's literacy learning is not a strong one. However, there is a strong connection between explicit knowledge and literacy learning. Those children who do have a relatively strong and explicit level of awareness of morphemes and grammar at younger ages learn to use morphemes in spelling more systematically at a later age. This explicit knowledge helps them to use the spelling for suffixes correctly, such as the "-ed" for past verbs, and also to preserve the spelling of stems across words. The connection between morphemes and literacy is a two-way street: Awareness of morphemes strengthens children's spelling and their knowledge of morphemic-spelling correspondences also promotes their awareness of morphemes at a later age. 3. It is possible to enhance children's explicit knowledge of morphemes through systematic instruction and to improve their performance in word reading and spelling. These teaching interventions are effective for normal readers and poor readers who are seriously underperforming for their age and intellectual ability. As things stand at the moment in our educational system, one of the main reasons for children's generally low level of explicit awareness of morphemes may be that they are taught very little about morphemes at school. All three of these statements have been amply supported by the results that we have reported here. The evidence that we have presented in this book has shown for the first time that it is possible to teach children in interesting ways about morphemes in the classroom and also that this learning has a good effect on children's literacy development. All the studies that we have reported point in the same direction. They show that it is possible and also highly desirable to teach children about the connection between spelling and morphemes, and that the essential ingredient of this teaching must be the promotion of children's explicit understanding of the morphemic structure of the words in their spoken vocabulary. We now wish to set these results in the context of contemporary educational theory and practice