1. Links to Current Research
   

2. Reading 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, Joanne Carlisle, Helene Deacon, Marcia Henry, John Kirby, and Terezinha Nunes are among a much larger group of researchers who have been investigating the role of this linguistic awareness in learning to read.
   

3. Two 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

bankrupted

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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

1. Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Reading Comprehension
   

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

This brand new 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, click here and consider this investigation of the word <automatic> in a Grade 5 class, or click here for 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>.

These are resources referenced in this website. The book images direct you to Amazon.  If you are interested in purchasing any of these books, please do so through the link below.

Click the image above for a video describing our resource books.

Click here for a valuable, free on-line tool...

The Word Searcher

1. This free site by Neil Ramsden is a crucial tool for teachers and student trying to look for patterns across words. It is data base of over 60 000 words that can be searched by letter string. For example, consider the 48 words it finds on the letter string <rupt> that a student might predict is the base of the word <erupt>:

1. This list suggests that the base <rupt> means ‘break’, a theory that is quickly confirmed by Kennedy’s Word Stem Dictionary or  the etymological reference from a good dictionary for any of these words. For example my Oxford gives this etymology for <abrupt>: ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Latin abruptus ‘broken off, steep,’ past participle of abrumpere, from ab- ‘away, from’ + rumpere ‘break.’
   

2. For <interrupt> the etymology shows the common root rumpere for ‘break’
   

3. <interrupt: ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin interrupt- ‘broken, interrupted,’ from the verb interrumpere, from inter- ‘between’ + rumpere ‘to break.’