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Teachers’ awareness and use of morphemes PDF Print E-mail
Independent evidence
Teachers’ knowledge and use of morphemes in their teaching reflects the most obvious aspects of morphemes and the documentation in the National Literacy Strategy. Teachers usually know about the meanings of prefixes such as ‘un’ or ‘pre’, suffixes such as ‘ness’ or ‘ion’ and the fact that adding ‘ed’ changes verbs to the past tense.  Teachers talk about morphemes in terms of visual features such as ‘letter strings’ or ‘ patterns’, but few talk about the fact that morphemes have meaning. Image

Your evidence and reflections
You might like to examine the extent to which your own teaching currently makes use of knowledge about morphemes.  You could review your plans for teaching spelling during the course of a long period of time, such as a half-term, and highlight whenever you planned to explore prefixes, suffixes, letter-strings or other aspects of morphemes.  What examples did the class encounter during that time?  You could compare your plans with suggestions in the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) and consider the following questions:

  • To what extent did your plans match explicit suggestions in the NLS?
  •  How far did you modify your teaching programme to suit the individual or collective needs of your class?
  •  Are there any aspects of teaching about morphemes that you think, on reflection, could have been usefully included?

 

Adapted from Reflective Activity 8-2c on the Reflective Teaching website at: http://www.rtweb.info/ch08/ra8-2c.html

Putting the evidence to work
Having reflected on your current practice in teaching in this area of literacy, you might like to consider whether what you offered seems broadly appropriate for your pupils and what you would like to change.  Could you experiment with a range of approaches to exploring the meaning of morphemes?

Find out more
Further infoTLRP Research Briefing no. 14 Why morphemes are useful in primary school
http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/no14_nunes.pdf

The full project is The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and Numeracy in Key Stage 2 (2001 – 2004) by Prof. Terezina Nunes, Prof. Peter Bryant and Dr. Jane Hurry.  The project website is at:  http://www.tlrp.org/proj/phase11/phase2h.html

Hurry, J. & Parker, M. (2004) The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy at key stage 2, TLRP Annual Conference, (Cardiff, November).  Available at: http://www.tlrp-archive.org/cgi-bin/search_oai_all.pl?pn=15&no_menu=1&short_menu=1


 
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