Louise Selby—Morph Mastery: A Morphological Intervention for Reading, Spelling and Vocabulary

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:12] Justin Baeder:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Louise Selby. Louise is a dyslexia specialist trainer, consultant, author, assessor, and teacher. She has 25 years experience working with SEND in Hertfordshire local authority in teaching, special needs coordinator, and advisory roles, and she now works freelance providing training and consultancy for schools as well as dyslexia assessment. Louise believes in partnership and collaboration, and this is at the heart of all she does. She's the author of Morph Mastery, Morphological Intervention for Reading, Spelling, and Vocabulary, which we're here to talk about today, as well as the books All About Dyslexia, a practical guide for primary teachers, and one for secondary teachers, which we've talked about recently on Principal Center Radio.

[00:54] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:56] Justin Baeder:

Louise, welcome back.

[00:57] Louise Selby:

Thank you. It's brilliant to be back.

[01:00] Justin Baeder:

Well, I'm excited to talk with you about mastering morphology. For starters, what is morphology? Because I have to admit, this is only a topic that I have learned much about very recently. I can't say I was ever trained as an educator or an administrator on what morphology is. So take us into that.

[01:18] Louise Selby:

Oh yeah, no, I'm excited to talk about that too. It's my hobby and my work. So morphology is, you do know about morphology because it's just the terminology. It's basically prefixes, roots and suffixes or bases. They're also known as the root suffix. side of things and it's about the units of meaning in the english language so our language is made up of we know it's made up of units of sound and letters that correspond with that with those sounds and that's known as phonics but it's also made up of these morphemes which are units of meaning and they're simply prefixes bases or roots and suffixes that's what morphology is So you use it all the time.

[02:04] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, that terminology is familiar. I think I remember hearing quite a bit growing up as well as in school about root words, prefixes, suffixes, Latin roots, Greek roots. What has recent research or recent developments in the kind of the specialty field of morphology revealed? What have we learned in recent decades?

[02:23] Louise Selby:

Yeah, so we know that our English language is a morphophonemic language and we know that what we call morphological awareness, which is basically the awareness and understanding of these morphemes in words, we know that that influences literacy. We know that it influences reading. comprehension spelling and vocabulary probably for obvious reasons because it is literally units of meaning so it's going to influence vocabulary but i think what is perhaps more surprising is how much influence it has on reading comprehension teaching morphology can impact comprehension and then We know that comprehension and reading comprehension, understanding, working with text, that influences morphological awareness, which influences spelling.

[03:21]

It's all related, isn't it? It's not just about teaching phonics and teaching the alphabetic code. What I think we're beginning to learn, and this is what really excites me in my field, and I am conducting some research on this, in fact, is how much morphology and morphological awareness influences struggling readers and struggling spellers. So I'm not bothered about the term dyslexia, but those children, students, learners who struggle more. And there is some research that seems to say that it does have more impact on interested in finding out more about that i'm also interested in what is known as the longitudinal effect of morphological training so looking at whether we're teaching skills for life or skills for learning and not just skills for spelling and reading and there is a small amount of research that shows that

[04:22]

If you train a child specifically, explicitly in morphological awareness, spelling, that continues to grow. They continue to develop even when you stop that intervention, which I think, you know, my field is dyslexia and literacy difficulties is so important because we need to teach these learners understanding about words, talking about words, talking about language and those skills that will help them to continue to learn.

[04:52] Justin Baeder:

Issues that come up in what you just shared that strike me as parallels to issues with phonics that many of our struggling readers need more explicit phonics instruction than they've historically received and Many of our struggling readers need more explicit morphology instruction than they've traditionally received and many of us as educators are may not be aware of that, especially if we didn't receive any of that type of training as students and yet became fluent readers. It's easy for us to miss things that we didn't need and not realize that our students may benefit greatly from them simply because we didn't get them explicitly. I don't think I had any explicit morphology instruction as a kid. I understand the idea of root words and prefixes and suffixes and have, you know, intuited a lot of those patterns. But you're saying there's opportunity in teaching them explicitly, especially for struggling readers?

[05:46] Louise Selby:

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think we might have discussed this a little bit last time, actually, Justin, that there's a bit of a difference between the States and the UK. But certainly I'm really pleased and welcome that there's been a drive towards more explicit teaching of phonics and synthetic phonics and the alphabetic code systematically, because that's what children need at the early stage of reading. But as I've said, our language is a morphophonemic language. So, you know, the most basic words like let's take the word wanted. A child who has learned to decode phonetically will say wanted and spell it like that.

[06:36]

And they might get want, because they might have been taught want. That's W-A-N-T. But that E-D, that's a morpheme. And the spelling there, the morphological spelling has been chosen, not the phonetic spelling. And we have to teach this. I love a story.

[06:54]

It's President Roosevelt. I don't know if you've heard of this, but he tried to work with the Simplified English Spelling Board to abandon words which weren't spelt phonetically. So I think this was this in about the early 1900s, I think. And so words like, well, like hunted, wanted, words which weren't spelled in a phonetic way. He said, let's just get rid of it and let's spell them as they sound. But we need that E.D.

[07:23]

in wanted. don't we and it happens in quite a lot of homophones as well words which sound the same but are spelt differently for very good reasons because there's morphemes in them because their suffix their prefix whatever it is is they're spelt for a reason so we need to teach this explicitly we need to not assume what i find in my field is that children often learn to spell phonetically and continue to spell phonetically and then as they progress through language it gets more morphologically complex but they're still spelling everything phonetically and not applying those morphemes and that needs to be taught for most children.

[08:07] Justin Baeder:

Well, take us into that a little bit more. So if a student does have a grasp of phonics, they're spelling phonetically, what kind of mistakes are they making when they haven't had that morphology instruction?

[08:18] Louise Selby:

So the classic ones that we find are the SHUN words. So let's say you've got these words like magician, production, procession and all of those have the SHUN in them. Now a phonics program might teach the SH as a sound, like the TI as a sound. And it might teach the SHUN as a syllable. Well, yeah, it is a syllable, but it's not a suffix. The suffix is ION or IAN.

[08:57]

So in magician, if you just teach the child magic with the C on the end and the IAN, it's much easier to remember that SH. And the same with production. If you teach product and that T, it's much easier to remember that. We don't need to teach that as a unit of sound, that TI. It's not a unit of sound. It's the duct.

[09:22]

Duct means lead. And then there's all those words like sign and signal, which. if you know I mean sign seems like a random word doesn't it but randomly spelt word but it's not it's related to signal and a lot of those words there is a reason for the way that they're spelled and I do find especially if you teach the meaning of some of these words so you know in product Abduct means to lead. It really helps to then think about other words, abduct, conduct, and then we're getting into cross-curricular vocabulary, aren't we? Conductor, induction, those sorts of words. That's the kind of spelling that really starts to make sense for these children with the errors that they make.

[10:10] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, that is fascinating. And almost every example that I've read, I found at least something that I had never explicitly thought about. Like, I've never thought about the fact that duct means to lead. You know, I can read all the words. I know all the words that have in them, but that was never explicitly brought up. And you're saying that very helpful to students.

[10:29] Louise Selby:

It's like one of the ones that often people don't know is that the silent W, W-R in right, wraith, ring, that actually means to twist. W-R, the background of that is to twist, like wrist. It's Christmas when I've made a wreath. that kind of thing, and that explains it, doesn't it? You don't have to just teach them it's a silent letter. You need that phonics because if you didn't have phonics, you couldn't say it's a silent letter.

[11:01]

You couldn't say that because you wouldn't be identifying those sounds in it. Silent is to do with sound. But the morphology helps you to understand and to connect all of those words. There's an explanation for every spelling. even if it's a slightly odd lapse in history. But again, you know words like onion.

[11:21]

So onion is one with the suffix I-O-N because it's got one root. And for me, that's so much easier to learn how to spell than just, it's just spelt strangely. Think of it as the O saying, oh, that doesn't have meaning to me. But one, drop off the E and add the I-O-N. Oh, yeah, it's related to one. And then the same with words like two, as in T-W-O, linked to twins.

[11:52]

That two side of it, it's not just a random, you know, we teach two, two and two is just words you have to remember. Well, if you link the number two to twins, then you've got some meaning. And that's what we're doing with morphology. It's helping children to understand. You know, I was in a conversation quite recently. We talk about sight words now.

[12:13]

learning sight words, and traditionally, you know, schools might think about phonetic words and then sight words, but I would argue that just having to remember a word by sight, even if it's not phonetically decodable, is not particularly helpful. We don't learn just by looking, or very few of us do. We do learn a lot by looking, but also talking about the letters within that and the sounds within that, like in the word to, like in the word... wrist, wraith, those ones with the silent letter.

[12:46]

It's really important to do that, talking about those sounds to help understand them so they don't become sight words, they become words that we've talked about in a metalinguistic way. We've understood a bit more and then we start to make links and we start to remember how to read and spell these words as well.

[13:03] Justin Baeder:

I need a minute to recover here because you're blowing my mind. pointing out that wreath and wrist and wrought iron and wrestle hole, all those silent W are connected by a root word that like nobody has ever told me about. Like I've never made that connection that W is silent because of that commonality there.

[13:26] Louise Selby:

So morph mastery is a spelling intervention, right? But you can't teach spelling, I don't think, without talking about meaning, and it's mind blowing. And when we start to investigate words, I always learn something new when I'm teaching morph mastery. I was doing some training talking about how to look up the meanings and origins of words, and I just picked the word derivative. Turns out it's linked to the word river. Did you know that?

[13:54]

I didn't know that. But that really helps explain it, doesn't it? It's kind of coming away from. It's like derivative. It's like flowing away from something. And the same with the other word that I looked up with some children was tributary.

[14:09]

And I hadn't, maybe everyone else knows this, but I hadn't thought that's related to tribe. So of the tribe, it's a tributary. It belongs to that river. And again, you know, the children and I had a discussion. That was one of their geography words, but it really helped them to remember it. I think there was one really good example, actually, where we talked about duct.

[14:31]

We just found the root duct. in some text and I said, look, go over to your lessons. These were children in early secondary school, so across the curriculum. And I said, go into your lessons and look for a word that has ducked in it. And one of them came back and she had over ducked. Which, of course, she'd been doing human reproduction.

[14:54]

So we ended up talking about human reproduction. But she'd noticed that duct meaning to lead. She'd noticed it in her science lesson. And this is a child who'd been picked out as a child who struggled with literacy. How cool. How cool is that?

[15:11]

So, yeah, it's really fascinating and mind blowing. And the great thing is you can do it systematically. You don't have to just investigate words and have fun, although that is brilliant. You can do this systematically because we have a spelling curriculum and we can teach the spelling curriculum. We can find the gaps, but we can do it in an investigative way.

[15:33] Justin Baeder:

I think some people will hear about morphology and think of it as a skill. Like if we just teach morphology, then students will have the skill of morphological awareness and they'll be able to read anything. But it sounds like there's actually a lot of specific content that students need to learn. Take us into that question, because I'm not sure I'm saying that right.

[15:56] Louise Selby:

Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. And actually something when I was researching morph mastery, I looked at both of those things, the skills and the knowledge. And I found the opposite, actually, that. A lot of people were providing resources to teach prefixes and suffixes. And that was that. But they weren't teaching the skill, that underlying morphological awareness of manipulating morphemes, investigating morphemes, finding out about morphemes.

[16:27]

That kind of underlying skill, which is known as morphological awareness. But in terms of the knowledge, you know, what I've done in Morph Mastery is... produce it starts with an assessment of going through the english language right back to the most basic morphemes which are um those grammatical suffixes generally like the plural s cats and then the es washes and i've devised an assessment which goes through all of the knowledge of morphemes it's actually based on our english curriculum but i understand that A lot of other people in other countries have said, you know, it's very similar to their curriculum. So it's just the English language, but it's systematic.

[17:11]

You can work out which suffixes they don't know. And what I found when I was researching this and what I've created is something that goes right back because I found. that children might know and spell suffixes like auto that's a prefix sub those ones but they might not be able to change the y to an i when you're adding er for example to a word like happier becomes the y becomes an i those rules are really hard and they're right back in We teach them to six-year-olds here, five, six-year-olds. And a lot of them haven't got that. And that's morphology. That's not a phonic thing.

[17:53]

That's the kind of knowledge that those gaps need to be filled in order to move forward in spelling and morphology, morphological knowledge. So it's kind of taught hand in hand. You know, I think this kind of word investigations should take place in class. And that's the skill. That's the looking at different morphemes in words, investigating, studying words, but also teaching the spelling of them. Really important.

[18:21] Justin Baeder:

My mind is blown over and over as I learn more from you. So the book is Morph Mastery, a morphological intervention for reading, spelling, and vocabulary. Louise, if people want to learn more about your work, your other books, or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online?

[18:37] Louise Selby:

I've got a website, Louise Selby Dyslexia. There's loads about Morph Mastery on there, loads of blogs and information pages. I'm also on most social media as well. So just look up Louise Selby Dyslexia and you'll find me.

[18:52] Justin Baeder:

Well, Louise, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.

[18:54] Louise Selby:

It's been a pleasure. Absolutely.

[18:56] Justin Baeder:

Pleasure.

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