How Word Study and Morphology Can Support Vocabulary Development

The English language has more than a million words. And some of these words also have  very specific purposes. And I like to think about a word like, “I had a slight glitch this morning today. We had a slight glitch with technology, right? But it wasn't a huge problem. It wasn't a catastrophe.” And so there's shades of meaning in how we use the words, but I have to experience that. So don't assume that I've had all those experiences with those words and looking at how they're used to convey meaning and emotion to the people that are reading or in my writing. And so our students really need that. And how we can build upon that is, for example, I told you that 60% of the English ... Well, that many of their students have a home language that is something like Spanish or Latin based. Well, 60% of our English language comes from Latin.

15% comes from the Greek. And we have a small percentage that comes from the French. So we borrowed from everywhere language, but what I want to tell you about that is that is a great word learning strategy. Some of the best word learning strategies to build that comprehension, to build that word meaning, includes knowing about those small meaning units such as a prefix, a root, or a suffix, and building words with those and playing. That's called morphology. But I, as a person who speaks more than one language, need to have metamorphological awareness, meaning that you need to help and make me understand, “Do I have this in my own language? Oh yes, I do. Look, there's a connection,” and it help builds not only, it helps build not only one word, but many words that are related to that. And then guess what happens? Those words oftentimes become what we call cognates, words that look similar in spelling and meaning.

Now, we do have to be careful because there's lots of words that look similar in spelling and meaning, and they're not our true friends. They're our false friends. We even have a whole dictionary full of those false friends. But when we know about morphology and we use that very powerful. And do you know, I'm so sad to tell you that the first time that I actually had that experience with morphology was when I was an undergraduate school student. I was an undergraduate student in the university and I took this course, Greek and Latin roots for medical terminology. I was thinking about that. I was thinking about all my life changed with that because it was then that I learned about these word parts, where these words come from, what do they mean? And I could build. And my vocabulary soared in English, and I wish I had had that earlier in my academic career, such as in elementary and middle school and high school.

So we can do this work and we can build upon this vocabulary, this word meanings, and we can use what we call morphology, those small meaning units to build thousands and thousands of words. What a great asset that would be if you could teach in that manner.