Knowing about these different types of words can help us teach morphological awareness more effectively
*Free download below and link to free morphological awareness games*
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know that I am a huge fan of teaching kids about morphological awareness in speech and language therapy.
This is because morphology is often not explicitly taught in classrooms, even though it can give kids a serious boost in skills like word learning, reading comprehension, and spelling.
If you need a quick refresher on what, exactly, a morpheme is, or what morphological awareness is, check out this post here.
According to a 2023 article by Apel, Henbest, Petscher, the transparency of roots and affixes is an important consideration when teaching about morphological awareness.
You may recall that affixes (prefixes and suffixes) can be either inflectional or derivational. Inflectional morphemes don’t change the word’s grammatical category (e.g., a verb will remain a verb, like when “jump” changes to “jumped”). Derivational morphemes change a word’s grammatical category (e.g., adding the suffix “-ly” to the adjective “quick” creates the adverb “quickly”).
But there is another important factor to consider when working on morphological awareness: Apel et al. explained that words that are built of a root/base word + affixes can be either transparent or opaque. Transparent words contain a base or root that does not change when the affix is added. Examples of this are: eat/eats, teach/teacher, quick/quickly, jump/jumping, etc. In each of these examples, the root word is unchanged when the affix is added; it sounds the same and is spelled the same.
Opaque words, on the other hand, undergo a change in either spelling, pronunciation, or both when the affix is added. Examples of this include: magic/magician, five/fifth, sign/signature.
Apel et al. concluded: "Educators and specialists working with third- through sixth-grade students on their morphological awareness skills likely should begin morphological awareness instruction using transparent inflected and derived forms of base words... As students begin to demonstrate an awareness between base words and their transparent forms, then practitioners can introduce inflected and derived words that represent some level of phonological and/or orthographic shift from its base word."
Transparent words will always be easier for kids to read, understand, and spell than opaque words. Which makes sense!
From here on out, I will be making a concerted effort to discern between transparent and opaque words when I'm working on morphological awareness with my students and will also explicitly teach about the changes that occur when affixes are manipulated in opaque words.
For a free morphological awareness game I made, check out this post!
Can't get enough morphological awareness info?
Here's a post with a morphological awareness goal and a bunch of free activities.
LEVEL UP YOUR SPEECH THERAPY ACTIVITIES WITH STORYWHYS
Did you find this blog post helpful? Subscribe below to get the latest blog posts, which feature lots of speech therapy ideas for busy SLPs who want to provide fun, impactful, and meaningful speech-language therapy.
Have you heard? StoryWhys now offers the Speech and Spell series of resources. I am always trying to tie articulation work and spelling together in my therapy and I've never found any good resources out there to help me do this. So I made my own! Many more speech sounds and spelling rules to come. They'll be 50% off for 48 hrs when new resources are added to the StoryWhys store. Find them here.
Did you know book companions can be among the best speech therapy materials for elementary students? Explore all of the StoryWhys book companions for speech therapy in my store. You'll find comprehensive book companions that target many different language skills or Spotlight Series book companions that focus on one type of skill, all using high-quality, beloved storybooks.
And get your FREE, 71-page book companion for speech therapy on the free downloads page.
Enjoy!
