How teaching morphology to ESOL students can be beneficial.

1. Complications in Teaching
Morphology to Second
Language Learners
By Aubrey Stenger

2. Applying Structural Analysis During Reading“looking for the little words inside the big
ones”
Recognizing word part - it may be difficult to know how to break words apart
Problem: quit out of mosquito has nothing to do with its meaning
Problem: con means with but can be spelled coauthor, combine, colleauge, correlate
Root or Base
Prevent
Word + tion (many different
spellings)
Prevention
Repress
Repression
Invert
Inversion
Evade
Evasion
Imagine
Imagination
Redeem
Redemption
Revolt
Revolution/revulsion

4. Learning the meaning
60% of words have Latin or Greek roots
Prefixes can have several different
meanings (in can mean in or not like in
Inside or incorrect).
Suffixes’ have different meanings also.
For example –ise means “to make” so
realize means to make real but
institutionalize does not mean “to make
institutional”.

5. Combining meaning of word parts:
Prefix
harder than it looks
Root
Re: back, again Cogn: know
Con: with
Bene: good
Decapitation
de=down
capit=head
ion= state or condition
Capitation=
Head + state or condition of
Un: not
Dic(t): say
De: down, from Greg: flock
Capit: head
Actual definition: a direct, uniform tax imposed upon each person
Beneficiate
Actual definition: to prepare iron for smelting
Benefice
Actual definition: an ecclesiastical office to which revenue for an endowment is
attached
Suffix
Ize: to make
Ion: state or
condition
Al: relation
to
Ate: to make
Able: able to

6. Developing Vocabulary
Pre-teaching vocab vs. building background
knowledge of a story: Which is better?
Front Loading is a the best technique that combined
learning vocabulary and new concepts with an activity
and discussion before reading about the topic.
Develop vocab through reading- Many studies
show extensive reading is the best way for
students to gain vocabulary.

7. Vocabulary is more often acquired, not
learned
The proof:
Fact: the average high school graduate knows 60,000 words.
If students only remembered the learned 20 words a week they
learned through vocabulary lessons x 12 years = 8640 words (but
students learn more than that so they must be learning them in
different ways).
Anderson and Nagy (1992) if average 5th grader reads 25
minutes a day = they read about 1 million words of text a year.
about 2% of the words are new words = 20,000 new words a year.
If 1 out of 20 words acquired (or learned because of continual
exposure in text), then 1000 words learned a year!

8. What does it mean to TRULY know a
word?
Phonological definition: pronounce the word correctly
For example: anemone= may be in written and read vocabulary but not spoken or
heard
Morphological definition: flexibly use the word in different parts of speech.
For example: humlbe=adj humility= noun humbleness=not correctly conjugated
Syntactic definition: placing the words in the correct order in a sentence
For example: The word blessed can be a verb or a noun depending on the context.
Semantic definition: give the definition of the word
Pragmatic definition: understanding society’s definition of a word that may be
different than Webster’s definition
For example: “I will tweet this” probably doesn’t mean they will sing like a bird
but post it on the internet.

9. Natural Order Hypothesis: Krashen
(2003)
People acquire components of a second language in
generally the same order naturally. Morpheme order:
1. -ing(progressive) and -s (plural) and copula(to be)
2. Auxiliary (progressive: he is going) and Article (a,
the)
3. Irregular past (ran)
4. Regular past (jumped) and third-singular -s

10. Works Cited
Freeman, D. E. & Freeman, Y. S. (2004). Essential Linguistics. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.