Morphological knowledge
The following extract is taken from the PETAA book, A Closer Look at Spelling in the Primary Classroom written by Grace Oakley and Janet Fellowes.
Morphological knowledge refers to an individual’s understanding of morphemes and how they can be used to form words. Morphemes are the parts of words that carry distinctive meaning; for example, the word unhappy is made up of two morphemes – happy and un and the word unladylike has three morphemes – un, lady and like. If these words are further divided, some of the parts will not retain any meaning and would not therefore be morphemes. Each of the words trust and technique have only one morpheme; although technique has two syllables, it is a single morpheme because it cannot be broken down into meaningful smaller parts in English.
Spelling competency is enhanced when writers know and understand morphemes and morphological principles and can use them to assist in spelling words. The spelling of longer words usually requires an ability to identify and assemble the component morphemes.
There are two types of morphemes – free (independent) morphemes and bound (dependent) morphemes.
Free morphemes are those that can function as stand-alone words. The free morpheme is highlighted in each of the following words:
- trusting (trust + ing)
- sadness (sad + ness)
- unhelpful (un + help + ful)
trust, sad and help are words and are therefore free morphemes
Bound morphemes, when added to words, alter their meaning or create new words. They are not words themselves and cannot occur independently. Bound morphemes include prefixes (eg, re-, dis-, trans-,) which are added to the beginning of words and suffixes (eg, -able, -ance, -less, -ly, -tion) which are added to the ends of words. The word to which a prefix or suffix is added is referred to as the base word.