Morphological awareness

As children learn to speak, read and write, they not only utilise and draw on the sounds of language, or phonemic and phonological awareness, but they also implicitly and explicitly recognise and apply knowledge of how sounds are combined systematically in a language to form meaningful units called morphemes. A morpheme is a meaningful unit of a language that cannot be further divided, such as single word

units (e.g. ‘at’, ‘the’, ‘table’) or parts of words that modify meaning (e.g. ‘un-’, ‘mis-’) or grammatical forms (-ed’, ‘-ing’, ‘-s’).

As Halliday (1993) puts it, learning language is learning how to convey meaning and how to extend meaning potential. Words create meaning, inspire us and help us make sense of the world. Understanding how words work and how they convey ­ meaning is crucial to building children’s vocabulary, spelling, oral language, reading and ­writing development. This chapter addresses important concepts related to the structure of

words – they comprise ‘morphological awareness’, which includes the awareness of morphemes and their different types and subtypes. The chapter also ­ discusses the ­ origin

of words, known as ‘etymology’, and the place of morphology and etymology in the Australian Curriculum: English. Finally, it discusses a scientific method for ­ teaching morphological awareness, spelling and vocabulary, known as Structured Word

Inquiry (SWI), drawing on evidence-based research. The purpose of this chapter is to provide pre-service and in-service teachers with explicit knowledge about how words work and how to teach them to help enhance students’ spelling, vocabulary, reading ­comprehension and, in turn, writing.