Teaching Word Parts to Enhance Student

Understanding
While teaching roots and affixes may help students make sense of
unfamiliar words, supplying students with long lists of "word parts" can
sometimes be overwhelming and unproductive. In this excerpt
from Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research
on What Works in Schools, academic vocabulary expert Robert J. Marzano
explains how to focus instruction on those affixes and roots that will give
you the most vocab-enriching bang for your buck!
Teaching of roots and affixes has traditionally been a part of regular
vocabulary instruction. The logic behind this instructional activity is that
knowledge of roots and affixes enables students to determine the meaning
of unknown words. Commenting on the work of Dale and O'Rourke (1986),
Stahl (1999) explains:
While words like geologist, interdependent, and substandard can
often be figured out from context, decomposing such words into
known parts like geo-, -logist, inter-,depend, etc., not only makes the
words themselves more memorable, but, in combination with sentence
context, may be a useful strategy in determining the meaning of
unknown words. (p. 44)
Adams (1990) also attests to the logic of teaching word parts, noting that it
is important "to teach [students], for example, that such words
as adduce, educe, induce, produce, reduce, and seduceare similarly spelled
because they share a common meaning element: duce, 'to lead' " (p. 151).
However, she adds the following cautionary note: "Although teaching older
readers about roots and suffixes of morphologically complex words may be a
worthwhile challenge, teaching beginning or less skilled readers about them
may be a mistake" (p. 152).
Affixes include prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes commonly augment the
meaning of the words to which they are attached. Suffixes commonly
change the part of speech of the words to which they are attached. Some
vocabulary researchers and theorists argue against teaching long lists of
affixes. Indeed, one of the most comprehensive sources of lists of prefixes
and suffixes is The New Reading Teacher's Book of Lists (Fry, Fountoukidis,
& Polk, 1985). It identifies more than 40 prefixes that indicate where
something is (e.g., in-, intra-, off-).
Fortunately, studies have identified those affixes that occur most frequently
in the English language. Specifically, White, Sowell, and Yanagihara (1989)
identified the most common prefixes based on a study of words in The
American Heritage Word Frequency Book (Carroll, Davies, & Richmond,
1971). As described by White and colleagues:

What is striking about these data is that a handful of prefixes account

for a large percentage of the prefixed words. The prefix un- alone
accounts for 26% of the total. More than half (51%) of the total is
explained by the top three prefixes, un-, re-, andin- "not". And with
just four prefixes, un-, re-, in- "not", and dis-, one could cover
approximately three-fifths of the prefixed words (58%). (pp. 302-303)
White, Sowell, and Yanagihara's study (1989) also identified the most
common suffixes. About their findings on suffixes, the researchers note:
It is plain . . . that the distribution of suffixes, too, is not uniform. The
first 10 suffixes listed comprise 85% of the sample. Plural and/or third
person singular -s/-es alone account for about a third (31%) of the
sample. Three inflectional suffixes, -s/-es, -ed, and -ing, account for
65%. In light of this, middle elementary teachers would do well to
concentrate on -s/-es, -ed, and -ing. (p. 303)
Along with teaching affixes, vocabulary instruction commonly teaches root
words. Again, a problem with roots is that they are so numerous that
instruction cannot cover all of them. Unfortunately, no usable study has
identified the most frequent or the most useful roots. Figure 4.7 identifies
some common Greek and Latin roots.
In summary, teaching affixes and roots, when done judiciously, can be a
useful aspect of direct vocabulary instruction. To this end, research has
identified those affixes that are used most frequently.

Excerpted from Building Background Knowledge for Academic

Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools by Robert J. Marzano