The article that we read this week, Breaking Down Words to Build Meaning: Morphology, Vocabulary, and Reading Comprehension in the Urban Classroom, made me think more about how I would teach new vocabulary to my students. As some of you may know, this is a very important subject to me. Basically this article teaches us how to use the root of a larger word to understand the meaning. I loved the example that the author started with, popularity. It gave us the example of how a fourth grade student used the root word, popular, to gain understanding about the larger word. I feel that if we can teach our students to do this we will be helping them expand their vocabulary but also their spelling.
When teaching vocabulary it will be very important to remember that all students do not learn the same way. We must identify effective strategies to use when we are working with different leveled students. I thought that it was interesting that the article found that children in urban schools had a lower vocabulary knowledge than the national average.
The article also talked about morphology. Morphology is the study of shape. So when related to words, we are looking at the inner words that make up a larger words. Morphemes are the smallest unit of a word. Two major types of these are bound such as prefixes and suffixes, they cannot stand-alone. Unbound morphemes, are roots within more complex words that can stand-alone. Researches have found that morphology does have a connection to reading comprehension. This does make perfect sense to me. If a child does not understand the meaning of a word, then how are they going to understand the text they are reading? I did see this when I did the reading assessment with a 3rd grade student. When the student began to miss words in the text her comprehension score also went down.
As we have talked in class, it will also be important for us to remember as teachers to only study a few vocabulary words at a time. It is a disservice to our students when we overload them with words. They are not able to grasp the meaning as well. They need to focus on a few words and use them and make them their own. This will help build their vocabulary over time.
