What’s in a word? Effects of morphologically rich vocabulary instruction on writing outcomes among elementary students

We examined effects of a 12-week, teacher-delivered, morphology-infused vocabulary intervention on writing outcomes for 4th and 5th grade U.S. students. The intervention (1) drew attention to the morphological structure of 40 Tier 2 words drawn from the Academic Word List, (2) taught morphologically...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Reading & writing 2022-02, Vol.35 (2), p.325-351
Main Authors: McCutchen, Deborah, Northey, Mary, Herrera, Becky Logan, Clark, Teixeira
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Education
Elementary School Students
Essay Tests
Grade 4
Grade 5
Intervention
Language and Literature
Learning outcomes
Linguistics
Literacy
Morphological complexity
Morphology
Morphology (Languages)
Neurology
Psycholinguistics
Social Sciences
Spelling
Students
Vocabulary
Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary instruction
Word lists
Writing
Writing Achievement
Writing acquisition
Writing Instruction
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Summary:We examined effects of a 12-week, teacher-delivered, morphology-infused vocabulary intervention on writing outcomes for 4th and 5th grade U.S. students. The intervention (1) drew attention to the morphological structure of 40 Tier 2 words drawn from the Academic Word List, (2) taught morphologically related forms of those words, and (3) provided opportunities for students to use morphologically complex words in reading and writing. Multilevel model results of posttests showed that intervention students (n = 246) outperformed control students (n = 273) on multiple researcher-developed measures, more accurately judging the meaning of instructed words and manipulating the morphological structure of both instructed and non-instructed words to fit more as well as less constrained sentence contexts. Intervention students also showed significantly larger gains on a standardized spelling assessment, although their gains on a standardized essay test failed to reach traditional significance levels. These results suggest that teacher-delivered morphological instruction can improve the writing of upper elementary students, at least at the word and sentence level, in addition to previously documented positive effects on reading.
ISSN:0922-4777
1573-0905
DOI:10.1007/s11145-021-10184-z