A New Approach to Reading Instruction
Do you know what morphemes are? Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language. Even though you may not know that term, I am sure you know morphemes if you are fluent in a language. In English, common morphemes such as <er>, <ed>, and <ing> are used frequently. Some morphemes, also known as suffixes, can change the tense of the word. For example <jump> turns into <jumped> or <jumping> and the tense of the verb is changed. Those are called inflectional suffixes. Other suffixes such as <er> change the grammatical category of the word such as <teach> (which is the verb) changes to <teacher> (which is a noun) when you add <er>. So why are morphemes important for reading instruction? Well, unlike phonics patterns, morphemes are both extremely consistent and always convey meaning. Now, this is not to say that phonics is not important, because it very much is but it has been used in isolation instead of in conjunction with morphology as it should be. English is a morphophonemic language which means that it uses both morphemes and phonemes.
