Morphological difficulties in dyslexia

What is morphology?

Morphology is the study of morphemes or units of meaning within words. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word to have meaning, and morphemes can build up to form different words.

Why is morphology useful for dyslexic students?

Louise Selby, specialist teacher and publisher of Morph Mastery, points out that Morphology is not a whole-word approach to teaching reading and spelling. It is also not an alternative to phonics (the sounds in words). Approximately 80% of words in the English language are made up of more than one morpheme, so learning a morphological approach helps students make sense of language and build words to correctly spell them.

How does morphology work?

Morphemes can be prefixes (at the start of the word), base words (core part that carries the primary meaning), and suffixes (at the end of the word). Prefixes and suffixes are known as affixes. They can also be a ‘function’ word like ‘for’, ‘of’ or ‘to’. The base words are often also called ‘root’ words as they trace back to their origins in Latin or Greek.

Example: predictable

Examples of morphemes

A word can have only one morpheme, or it can be made up of many.

Word	Morphemes	Number of morphemes	Types of morphemes
fast	fast	1	Base
quickly	Quick    -ly	2	Base, suffix
recycle	Re-   cycle	2	Prefix, base
blackberry	Black  berry	2	Base, base
Unbreakable	Un break able	3	Prefix, base, suffix
uncharacteristically	Un character istic ally	4	Prefix, base, suffix, suffix

Base words

Base words hold the main part of the word’s meaning and can be split into free bases, which can be a word on their own or have additional morphemes added to them. For example, play is a word on its own, but can have -ed added to make played. Bound bases need to have another morpheme to make a word i.e. ‘ject’ and ‘rupt’ are bound bases but can be made into words by adding affixes, i.e. rejection, eruption.

Why teach morphology?

Research suggests that morphological processing is independent from phonological processing, and that dyslexics compensate for phonological weaknesses by using morphological skills (Law, Ghesquiere, 2021). By teaching a morphological approach, dyslexics will:

• Show improved decoding, especially of multi-syllabic words

• Enhance spelling skills

• Build vocabulary

• Strengthen grammatical skills

• Improve reading comprehension

Where to start

Morph Mastery by Louise Selby

For more information on teaching morphology, see Sarah's snippets