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MARY BETH CALHOON: Hello, my name is Mary Beth Calhoon and I’m an associate professor at Lehigh University. I would like to welcome you to the wonderful world of morphology. Today, we are going to look at the basics of morphology. We’re going to just look at those very basic elements that make up beginning morphology in this slide presentation. I hope that you thoroughly enjoy it and that you get a lot out of it. First off, I would like to acknowledge my doctorate student Emily Sharp’s help in creating this PowerPoint. Okay, let’s begin. So what do you as a teacher need to know about the very basics of morphology? Well, let me tell you, it’s a lot, but it’s fun and it’s really simple to understand. First, what is morphology? Morphology is the shape of a linguistics unit. For example, a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has meaning. Morphos, which is from ancient Greek, means shape or change. Eme means the smallest element of something. Therefore, morpheme means the smallest thing that can change. Therefore, when we’re talking about morphology when it deals with words, we’re talking about how you can change the meaning of a word with the smallest of change. A morpheme can be a whole word, such as chair, dragon, or chocolate; part of a word, such as re, let, est, or er; a single phoneme, S or Y; or it can be a whole word part like able, such as able in the word comfortable. Morphological awareness is the understanding that words are made up of meaningful units, such as your prefix, your root, and your suffix. So when kids are aware of morphology, they are aware that words have these three different elements. Now not all words are going to have these three different elements, but that there’s the possibility. And they have an understanding of what each of these elements are when they see them in a word. Morphological awareness complements and extends phonological awareness. Students will learn that some syllables are meaningful word parts. They’ll also learn that common prefixes and suffixes have meanings. They’re not just attached to these words to look pretty. They actually carry meaning. And once again, we go back to that term of morpheme, where when you make the smallest of change in a prefix, a root, or a suffix, then you’re changing the meaning of the language. Students are able to use morphemes to spell and read words. If students have a knowledge of morphemes and how words are put together, then they’re able to better understand how they’re spelled. And understanding for teachers, component skills of morphological awareness are knowing the parts of words and how they make up the structure of longer words, using knowledge of morphemes to 1 help with spelling, using morphology to inform understanding of base words and derived forms of words. So as a teacher, you need to understand all of these three things within morphology so that you can further teach your students. Morphology is taught very similar to phonemic awareness. Some of the activities for teaching morphological awareness are segmenting words into morphemes, matching morphemes to their meanings, and using morphemes to make words. We’re going to go through all of those in this slide. Sorry, in this presentation. Here’s some practice segmenting morphemes. Okay, we have the word projector. Take a moment. Everyone segment projector into its morphemes. Just give it a good try, a try. Okay. Here’s how projector would be segmented into its morphemes. Now if we had students do that, now we would also segment it into its meanings. Pro means ahead, ject means throw, and or means things that does. Now let’s do undivided. Do the same thing to undivided. Segment it into morphemes. Okay? This is how undivided segments out. Now let’s look at the meanings of each of these morphemes. Un means not, divide means to separate, ed means past tense. So the definition of undivided would mean not separated. Autobiography. It’s a little bit of a harder word. Give it a shot. There’s what it looks like. There’s the Y. So now let’s look at what auto means. Self, life, written, and noun. So this is something written about your life by yourself, which is what autobiography is. Now this is a very good website that we found that what it does is it provides you with a list of the Greek and Latin roots in English, and it provides you with the definitions of them. So we’ve incorporated that into this slide and presentation so that you could have this. There we go. What this does is, as you can see here if I can get out of the way, is it’s going to give you a lot of the prefixes and suffixes, a whole bunch of them, and their meanings. This way you’ve got a website that you can go to, you can send your kids to to help find the meanings of a lot of these prefixes and suffixes to help do a project like this. Okay. Now let’s do some more of this. Misplaced, segment that into morphemes. Okay, there we go. Now mis means wrong. Place means put. Ed means past tense. So this means that you put something in the wrong place in the past tense. Not that you’re doing it now, but that you did it before. Lifesaver, break that into morphemes. Life means living, save means keep, er means one that does. So this is someone that keeps things living. Transaction, give that one a shot. Trans means across. 2 Act means do. Tion is a noun. That means that transaction is a noun. So transaction means to do something across. We’re going across boundary lines with this transaction. There’s another website that also provides you with a lot of morphemes, their meanings, and connects them together for you. Okay, in the basics of morphology, morphemes come in two types. They’re either free, hence our little signal of birds flying away, or they’re bound and are anchored, meaning they anchor down into other words. Free morphemes can be used alone as words, such as salamander, boat, or candle. They don’t depend on any other word part to be a word. And they can have one or more syllables. The types of free morphemes are function words. What’s a function word? Function words serve grammatical function, but don’t have specific meanings on their own. For example, conjunctions. Conjunctions are function words. They are also free morphemes. Prepositions. Prepositions are functions words because they indicate a place, time, or sequence. They are also free morphemes. Pronouns, they refer to nouns and substitute for them. They’re function words and they’re free morphemes. Auxiliary verbs, they help main verbs to show tense, voice, or to express implicit meaning using syntax. They are also function words, plus they’re free morphemes. And definite articles, such as the, an, and a are used with nouns to show degree of specificity of the reference. They’re function words and they’re free morphemes. See, we’re flying, we’re free. Free morphemes can be also content words, which are the most meaningful in sentences. So now we know that free morphemes can be function words and they can be content words. Content words are your nouns, your verbs, your adverbs, your adjectives. Those are where you derive all of your meaning from your sentence, and those are your free morphemes. They’re also compound words. Compound words are made up of two free morphemes that keep their meaning. And when they come together, they still keep that meaning, but they also derive another new meaning. These are from our Anglo-­‐Saxon friends and from the origin of Anglo-­‐Saxon in our language, such as sailboat. Sail and boat both keep their original meaning, but when they come together, it’s not just a sail or just a boat. We now have that they’re a sailboat. Armchair, we know what arm means, we know what chair means. And when we put them together, we have a chair that you can rest your arms on. Same as input. Okay, we’re going to highlight the base word or the free morpheme from which the longer word is constructed. So in masterful, which is the free morpheme? Highlight it or underline it. Correct, it’s master. In unhappy, what would it be? Correct, it’s happy. See, you guys are doing a great job. Let’s do 3 some more. Where is it in adventure? Great, it’s adventure. In refill, it would be fill. [inaudible]. Where is it in hopefulness? Hope. Childhood, it would be child. Very good. Oh, look at this one. Where’s our base word or our free morpheme in that word? If you did establish, you did very good on that one. Misunderstand, understand. Excellent. Okay, now we just finished talking about free morphemes. Now we’re onto bound morphemes. These are bound up. They have to be combined with other morphemes to be a word. They cannot stand alone. Elect, we don’t ever walk around just saying e or lect. It doesn’t have any meaning until you put it together as elect. They are not words by themselves, as in disrupt. Together, they make sense, disrupt. I’m causing chaos, I’m disrupting my life. They can also have more than one syllable. Tele is our bound morpheme. Now this is a word that has a bound and a free morpheme, because graph is a free morpheme, but tele has to bind onto graph to actually have any meaning. And tele is two syllables, so bound morphemes can also be two syllables. Types of bound morphemes. Remember, we went through all our types of free morphemes, which were our function words and our content words. So in our bound morphemes, this is where we get into the wonderful world of prefixes. Prefixes are added to the beginning of words and they change the meaning of the base word, such as pre or ad or mis. Root words. You have bound morphemes that actually provide the root word within the word. They provide the meaning, such as rupt or ject or tane. And then the suffixes. Suffixes are added to the end of words and can indicate number, tense, or part of speech: such as s, which would be your plural form, ing, and tion. When we identify morphemes, it can be tough. You can start with the definition of the word parts, which is what we did previously, which is a good way to do it. You can also find another word where that word part is used. Additionally, you need to think of the overall word and its meaning to decide if there is one or more meaning in that one morpheme. Mistletoe and salamander, for example, are double-­‐syllable, triple-­‐syllable words. However, there is only one morpheme because each of those words only has one meaning. Sometimes the clues can mislead you. It isn’t enough to find little words in the big ones. For example, napkin is not a compound word. Mistletoe, if you go back up above, appears to be a compound word because have 4 mistle and toe. But when you put them together, they come up with one meaning. They don’t maintain their separate meanings when they’re together because mistletoe is a bush. It’s not a missile with a toe. A letter combination may be a morpheme in one word, but not in another, such as in unhappy, un is a morpheme. But in under, under is a single morpheme all by itself. The structure of English words is complex, and meanings can be variable. For example, power, er is a suffix, but not in this word. Mistletoe, mis is a prefix, but it’s not in this word. In the word period, peri is a prefix, but not in this word. Comic, com means with or together, but not in this word. Comic is a comedian. So we want to identify the number of syllables and then the number of morphemes in these words. So we’re going to have some practice. So first, identify the number of syllables in each of these words. There we have serious broken out in syllables. Now how many morphemes does it have? It has three syllables and one morpheme, because serious contains one meaning. Lastly, two syllables, how many morphemes? Can anybody guess? It has two morphemes in it, because you have last and then ly adds in a tense to it. Crept, one syllable, one morpheme. Sample, two syllables, and only one morpheme. So it doesn’t always matter if the word is two or three syllables. That doesn’t match up with the number of morphemes. You have to look at the meaning behind the word and the meaning behind each of the morphemes. Let’s try it again. Heighten, let’s break it into syllables. Two syllables. Oh, I gave you a clue on this morpheme here. It’s two morphemes. Dangerous, three syllables, two morphemes. I’m giving this one away to you guys. Mixed, one syllable. See, this is a case where a word is one syllable, but two morphemes because the ed adds a tense to it. Colder, two syllables, two morphemes. Okay, see my superman there? In English, the most powerful morphemes are the suffixes, which can be inflectional or derivational. We’re going to go over each one of these. Inflectional suffices, they change the tense or number, but not the part of speech of the word. For example, cat, cats. The inflectional suffix is our s. Talk, talked, the inflectional suffix is the ed. We went from present tense talking, or talk, to past tense talked. Derivational suffixes, they’re a little more difficult than inflectional because they’re going to change the part of speech of the whole word. Neutral derivational suffixes don’t change the sound or accent of the word. For example, quarter, quarterly; plenty, plentiful. None of the vowel sounds or the letter sounds in the word quarter changed when I added the ly to it. The same with the word plenty when I added ful to it. The sound of each of those letters in plenty didn’t change. 5 Non-­‐neutral derivational suffixes will change and can change the vowel pattern of a word, which means you might end up pronouncing the word differently when you add that suffix onto it. What it does is bring in that wonderful, elusive schwa sound. For example, invite becomes invitation. We don’t say invitation, we sound invitation. And that happens because of the unstressed syllable that that now becomes when we add the suffix onto it. Evolve becomes evolution, not eva, evolution. We take it down to the schwa sound. This is what derivational -­‐-­‐ non-­‐neutral derivational suffixes do to words. Okay, changes produced by derivational morphemes. First off, they can make it very complicated for students to understand spelling and pronunciation. They can also make it very difficult for students to remember what the base root word is and where the new word has come from. So you have to really go over this with students so that they really remember that that base root word is the same even though you’re starting to pronounce it differently. So there’s a category for which all of these suffixes fall under and how they make the word changes. So suffixes that make nouns are er, or, cian, and ist. If you add those to a word, you’re going to make a noun. Now there’s plenty more that also do that, like tion also makes it a noun. These are persons. Sion, tion, ment, ity, they make things nouns also, but they make things nouns, not persons nouns. Okay? These suffixes are the ones that make verbs. If you add ize or ify onto a word, you turn it into a verb. If you add ly to a word, you turn it into an adverb. If you add ar, ous, ive, al, ful to a word, you then make it an adjective. So let’s do this. Let’s identify the derivational -­‐-­‐ if this is an inflectional or derivational suffix. Is s or es inflectional or derivational? It is inflectional because it changes the number of things. Ful is derivational because it’s going to make something an adjective or an adverb. Er, est is one of those things that it can be inflectional and derivational because it’s going to make it a comparative adjective or it’s going to make it a verb -­‐-­‐ make a verb change to a noun. Ed is inflectional because it changes tenses. Tion is deriviational; it makes nouns. Okay, what we’re going to do here is I want you to do what part of speech each word is. Move is a verb. If we add movement to it, what part of speech does it now become? A noun. Nature is a noun. If we add al to it, it becomes an adjective. Ignite is a verb. Tion is going to change it into a noun. Liquid is a noun. Ify is going to change it into a verb. Comment is a verb. Commentator has been changed to a noun. This is how derivational suffixes influence and change parts of speech of which a word is 6 associated with. If students can begin to understand this and know which suffixes do what to what words, then they start to really understand how to spell. Rule. We talked about inflectional suffixes and we also talked about derivational suffixes. Some words have both types of suffixes on them. So which one do you add first? If you have both of these, the inflectional suffix is added on after the derivational suffix when making a word. For example, we would say fun to funny, y being the derivational, into funniest. We wouldn’t try to put the plural inflection suffix in front of the y. That would just sound funny. Then we go from ring to ringer to ringers. Name, nameless, namelessness. So the rule is the derivational suffix comes first, and then the inflectional. So what do we teach and when? Morphology by grade level. In first and second grade, we should teach suffixes and their meanings. You would teach just the common, general suffixes like you might teach er, ed. And you want to teach that longer words are made up of parts. In third through sixth grade, you want to begin to teach the most common prefixes, roots, and suffixes so that they start to begin to understand and have a good knowledge of vocabulary, what all these mean that when you add this pre onto test, all of a sudden it’s before the test. In middle and high school, then you begin to teach those morphemes that are essential for reading in your specific content areas. So as you can see here, if you start in first and second grade and build into high school, then you have a nice momentum on how morphology is going to help the students learn to understand, by the time they hit middle and high school, the essential morphology for their content areas. And all the way through K-­‐12, you want to teach about language, and then your specific subject when you teach in terms of the key terms of morphology, such as what is a prefix, what is a root word, what is a suffix? Inflectional suffixes, derivational suffixes, all those differences and how they function within words. Here’s a website that has morphological lesson plans and activities. I’m going to show you how to kind of navigate this, and then I’m going to work through a small lesson with you so that you can see how to do small, mini lessons with morphology. If you look here, this is a really great site that is free to teachers. It’s called Free Reading. If you come down here, this shows a lot of your prefixes and suffixes. And then you’ve got graphic organizers and you’ve got extension activities or games. If I wanted to teach the suffix pre, I can come over here to extension activities and it pulls all of these up, of which I have a choice to use. For example, if I wanted to use root words using a math 7 equation, here’s the whole lesson plan. Tells me exactly what to do and it also provides materials. For example, it’s going to give me a worksheet that I can print off that has the equation on it. So w hat we’re going to do is, using that lesson plan, I’m going to do a mini lesson using the prefix pre, because I want my students to understand what pre means. So I’ve gone to the Free Reading and I’ve pulled this off. And so the first thing I’m going to do is talk to my students about what the meaning of the word pre is. Pre is a prefix that’s added to the beginning of words. It changes the meaning of a word. Pre is a prefix that is used in many words: prepay, preview, and pregame are all words that have the prefix pre in them. Then I would ask my students, do you know of any other words with pre in them? Let the students brainstorm. Let them find all kinds of words that they know. Then I’ve got a list of words that have pre in them. These are the words we’re going to learn and work with at the moment: prepay, pretest, preheat, preview, and prejudge. If I’m going to pay for something, I would pay for it at the time that I’d buy it, right? If I add this prefix pre onto pay, it says prepay. Now how has that changed the meaning of the word? That means that I would now pay for it before I went and picked it up, or before I bought it. Pretest, we all know what the word test means. Your students are going to know that quite well. If I add pre to it, it means this is what I’m going to do before the test, or it’s a test before the test. Heat, heat means to make something hotter. If I preheat it, that means I’m heating it before I actually do the main heating. Preview is seeing something before anybody else gets to see it. And prejudge means that you’ve made up your mind about somebody before you actually know who they are, or the situation. We would go over all the definitions of those. Oh, and we have the term preteen there. Most of your students will know what preteen is, although that seems to have changed later to be preteen is almost 10 or 11 now. But most students will understand what preteen is. So here’s how you would use this math equation. You have the word pre in the triangles. Then we would have students put test there. You put it together, pretest. Preview. Prepay. So that they’re seeing that these words are broken up into two different segments, then they put them back together. Preheat, preteen. It’s a very simple, little mini lesson that you can do on morphology so that they’re understanding that words are made up of morphological parts and how just adding that prefix to the beginning of those words changes their understanding. 8 That Free Reading site has a lot of different lesson plans and ideas to do these short, mini lessons that you can add into all of your lessons throughout the year. And it doesn’t take a whole lot of time. And then the other websites that we had on the previous slides that give you all of the list of the prefixes, suffixes, and their definitions. Between those two sites, you should be able to come up with quite a few, little mini lessons. So how does morphemic awareness help our students? Understanding morphology develops language skills through decoding, students and vocabulary, comprehension, and spelling. In decoding, morphology promotes quicker and more accurate word reading. In vocabulary, it expands from unknown words to known words and word parts. It helps students to do that. In comprehension, it provides grammatical information that helps with connected text reading. And in spelling, it helps with non-­‐phonetic English spelling because if they start to understand where the prefixes and suffixes come from and their meanings, then they understand that they have a standardized spelling system, and that they then can begin to memorize those and add them into their spelling repertoire. So that is it for basic morphology. We thank you for your interest in morphology and we hope that you will stay tuned or plug into our next morphology video. Thank you very much. 9