Various pieces of writing by Peter Bowers are here describing how this literacy instruction, which is framed by the structure of the written word, links to educational philosophy and reading research. http://www.yahoo.com/

Working with the Regional Assessment & Resource Centre at Queen’s University (www.queensu-hcds.org/ort/rarc/)


2-Week Pilot Project: Teaching word structure as a strategy to support literacy skills for a small group of Grade 8 struggling readers

Carolyn Wiens, a fellow Wolfe Islander, who works as a psychologist at the Centre, approached me some time ago to see if she thought the instruction we are doing might be effective with late elementary and/or high school students. We agreed that problem-solving word structure and links between morphologically connected words with matrices and word sums had particular motivational value for struggling older readers. There must be few things less appetizing to the teenager than carrying around and struggling to read books for Grade 4 readers. With financial support from the head of the Centre Dr. Allyson Harrison, a two-week course with four Grade 8 students assessed at reading at around the Grade 4 level was planned for the two weeks prior to entering high school.


Carolyn and research assistant, Caroline Johns, observed and participated in the instruction, learning many features about how English spelling works along with the students. While this was not a formal research project, the observations of all involved was that the students gained a great deal out of the daily two hour sessions. It was clear that students were learning and then applying patterns addressed in the lessons. As is common, many lessons were fueled by questions brought by students. One illustrative example occurred as a result of my challenge to return the next day with any word they were curious to investigate.  One student returned with the compelling word <pandemonium>. When I asked how the suffix might be spelled, one student suggested <*-om>, but another countered correctly that <-um> was more likely as we had already touched on this suffix with words of Latin origin like <vacuum>. I agreed that often these advanced words are of Latin origin, and I offered other examples like <curriculum>. Students also suggested the prefix <pan-> which we confirmed with the phrase “Pan-American Games” and the word <pandemic> for a disease that spreads across a wide area. We suspected a connector vowel before the <-um> suffix, and then I was at a loss for the base – especially as my lack of deep understanding of the word led me to misspell the base on the assumption of ‘sound’. My theory as we worked on a white board was *pan+damon+i+um. Since we could make no sense of <damon>, we opened the dictionary to discover my error, and the real spelling – and thus structure: pan+demon+i+um. I’ll leave you to consider the clarity of meaning that came with that changed vowel letter, with a confirmation by looking at the origin of this word in your dictionary.


The interest and participation of the students during this pilot made such an impression on those at the Centre that various plans of how to capitalize on this mode of instruction for those struggling with literacy at this age have been started. For those of you interested to hear an alternate account of the impression of this instruction you could email Carolyn at wienswroe@kos.netor. For more on the Regional Assessment & Resource Centre visit www.queensu-hcds.org/rarc/. 

PowerPoint Links

Click here for the PowerPoint file from the workshop presented by Pete Bowers and John Kirby at the 6th Annual Conference for the Canadian Language and Literacy Network in Calgary on June 11/07. This link also includes the updated presentation used at the 1st Stavanger Reading and Writing Conference in Norway, and at the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University, England at the invitation of Peter Bryant and Terizinha Nunes.

WordWorks Links to Research & Researchers

“It is an important, though shockingly neglected, fact that one of the best ways to help children to become experts in reading and spelling is to make sure that they are thoroughly familiar with the morphemic system in their own language.”

Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant, (2006, p. 16)

“Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes”

“Leaving morphological analysis to be discovered by students on their own means that those who are not inherently linguistically savvy are likely to be left behind their peers in the development of vocabulary, word reading and comprehension, and spelling.”

Joanna Carlisle, (2003, p. 312)

“Morphology Matters in Learning to Read”

"It is my firm opinion that we should use all the structure there is in a written language to alleviate the task of children learning to read and spell, particularly children with educational needs, because they need all the help there is to acquire literacy skills.”

Anna Bosman,

Department of Special Education at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands

From an eMail to WordWorks before her Kingston visit

  1. Some Places to Start...

  2. Reading, vocabulary and spelling research has recently become interested in something called morphological awareness.  This area of research has important links to the instruction used at WordWorks. Morphological awareness refers to a child’s awareness of and ability to manipulate the smallest meaningful units of words called morphemes (prefixes, suffixes and bases). Peter Bryant, Terezinha Nunes, Joanne Carlisle, Shane Templeton, William Nagy, Marcia Henry, John Kirby, Helene Deacon and are just a few among a much larger group of researchers who have been investigating the role of this linguistic awareness in learning to read.

  3. Three books that look at this research, but present it for a wider audience are identified here. For those interested in more information of this area of research, email Peter Bowers directly (peterbowers1@mac.com) for some suggestions of possible starting points in the research literature.

  4. Unlocking Literacy: Effective Decoding & Spelling Instruction

  5. Marcia Henry, 2003

Marcia Henry has written about the importance of direct, explicit instruction showing children how the writing system works for twenty years. This is an excellent book for teachers and researchers looking for a resource linking theory and practice. A large part of the book is devoted to ideas for classroom instruction. She provides an important background on the history of the English language and a useful summary of reading research over the last 25 years. One important theme of that research is the view that we help children learn to read and write when we provide explicit instruction about the structure and patterns of the written word. We need to show children how written words work!

Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant are very well known for their work in reading research. The paper by Bradley and Bryant (1983) in Nature was fundamental to the study of phonological awareness that has become central to reading research. The role of morphology in literacy development has been an interest of Bryant and Nunes over the past decade. This new book emphasizes their recent intervention studies using morphological instruction. With only a short training course in morphology, teachers implemented their instructional program with impressive results for student learning. This book is also recommended for a strong linking of theory and practice.

  1. Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes

  2. Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant, 2006

This recent book presents what the current research has to say on how children develop vocabulary, the role of vocabulary knowledge for literacy in general, and reading comprehension in particular. The editors have selected major researchers in the field to summarize their findings, and present their points of view.


Of particular relevance to the instruction supported by WordWorks and illustrated in this website are the chapters by William Nagy entitled “Metalinguistic Awareness and the Vocabulary-Comprehension Connection” and especially Joanne Carlisle’s “Fostering Morphological Processing, Vocabulary Development, and Reading Comprehension. Consider this quote from Carlisle’s summary:


“Understanding unfamiliar words in texts, which is critical for reading content-area texts in school, requires inferences about word meanings. Inferences about word meanings are made on the basis of analysis of morphological structure of words and analysis of the use of the words in context...Of considerable importance is further study of methods to prepare teachers so that they understand the importance of word analysis for text comprehension, are effective at teaching word and text comprehension strategies, and can lead discussions of texts that help students internalize methods of thinking about the meanings of words and texts” (Carlisle, 2007, p. 99).


For just two examples of the kind of instruction Carlisle is describing, consider this investigation of the word <automatic> in a Grade 5 class, or this response from Melvyn Ramsden with one of my Grade 4 students who  used multiple references to investigated the underlying meaning and structure of the word secretary.

  1. Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Reading Comprehension

  2. Richard K. Wagner, Andrea E. Muse, Kendra R. Tannenbaum  editors. 2007

  1. Links to Current Research

  2. This website is designed for teachers trying to get a handle on how the writing system works and how they can bring that system alive in the classroom. Pete Bowers’ day job is that of a doctoral student means that much of his time is spent diving into the research in this area. This page is hopes to point those who are are curious about the research basis of the instruction supported by WordWorks to a few references of researchers looking at similar areas, and to provide the existing research Pete has produced on this exact instruction.

  3. Details on Pete’s research work on this instruction can be found at this link. For the seriously curious, Pete’s thesis is available at that link as well. Pete’s delighted to report that his submission to Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal on vocabulary results from morphological instruction has been accepted for publication. More on that here.

Copyright Susan and Peter Bowers 2008

Research on WordWorks instruction:

  1. BulletIntervention (Bowers & Kirby, 2009) published in Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

  2. (Intervention lessons featured in our resource books.)

  3. BulletWordWorks @ 54th Annual IRA Conference

See handout of poster on intervention results here.
 

Research on Morphological Interventions in General:


Download Pete’s poster presentation titled Effects of Morphological Instruction on Literacy:  a Meta-Analysis (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2009) presented at SSSR in Boston June 25-27.

Basic findings:

  1. BulletMorphological instruction brings moderately large effects for literacy measures compared to controls and equals alternative interventions using established “best practice”.

  2. BulletLargest gains shown for less able readers

  3. BulletPre-school to Grade 2 interventions as effective as older grades.