AFFIX/MORPHEME CHUNKING
Instructions​​
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Introduce students to high-utility prefixes, suffixes and roots. (Common Content Area Roots & Affixes)
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Show students how to identify and separate morphemes in a word (e.g., transportation → trans + port + ation).
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Use content-related texts or word lists to find and chunk multisyllabic words.
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Have students predict or explain the meaning of the whole word based on its parts.
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Engage students in word-building, word-sorting, or matching morphemes with meanings. Encourage application during independent reading.
Considerations:
Word activities with adolescent readers are ideally paired with reading texts and making meaning. Select words students will encounter in the texts and content you are teaching. Consider having students chunk words from a text prior to reading, and then ask them to make a prediction about the text.
​THE RESEARCH
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The IES Guide for Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9 recommends teaching academic language and complex word structures explicitly, especially for students who struggle with comprehension. Specifically, it states:
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“Teach students to use knowledge of morphology to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.”
(Recommendation 2, Practice Guide, What Works Clearinghouse, 2022) -
The guide emphasizes that morphological instruction—breaking words into parts—can help students improve vocabulary and comprehension by giving them strategies to tackle complex academic language. It recommends this as part of a comprehensive vocabulary approach.