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Improving Literacy by
Teaching Morphemes
Words consist of units of meaning, called morphemes. These morphemes

have a striking effect on spelling that has been largely neglected until
now. For example, nouns that end in “-ian” are words that refer to
people, and so when this ending is attached to “magic” we can tell that
the resulting word means someone who produces magic. Knowledge of
this rule, therefore, helps us with spelling: it tells us that this word is
spelled as “magician” and not “magicion”.
This book by Terezinha Nunes, Peter Bryant and their colleagues
shows how important and necessary it is for children to find out about
morphemes when they are learning to read and to spell. The book
concentrates on how to teach children about the morphemic structure
of words and on the beneficial effects of this teaching for children’s
spelling and for the breadth of their vocabulary. It reports the results of
several studies in the laboratory and in school classrooms of the effects
of teaching children about a wide variety of morphemes. These projects
showed that schoolchildren enjoy learning about morphemes and that
this learning improves their spelling and their vocabulary as well. The
book, therefore, suggests new directions in the teaching of literacy. It
should be read by everyone concerned with helping children to learn to
read and to write.
Terezinha Nunes is Professor of Educational Studies at the University

of Oxford and Fellow of Harris-Manchester College, Oxford.
Peter Bryant is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Oxford Brookes

University and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.
Improving Learning TLRP
Series Editor: Andrew Pollard, Director of the ESRC Teaching and

Learning Programme
Improving Learning How to Learn: Classrooms, schools

and networks
Mary James, Paul Black, Patrick Carmichael, Mary-Jane Drummond,
Alison Fox, Leslie Honour, John MacBeath, Robert McCormick,
Bethan Marshall, David Pedder, Richard Procter, Sue Swaffield,
Joanna Swann and Dylan Wiliam
Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes

Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant
Improving Schools, Developing Inclusion

Mel Ainscow, Alan Dyson and Tony Booth
Improving Subject Teaching: Lessons from research in

science education
John Leach, Robin Millar, Jonathan Osborne and Mary Radcliffe
Improving Workplace Learning

Karen Evans, Phil Hodkinson, Helen Rainbird and Lorna Unwin
Improving Literacy by
Teaching Morphemes
Edited by
Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant
with Ursula Pretzlik and Jane Hurry
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business
© 2006 editorial matter and selection, Terezinha Nunes and
Peter Bryant; individual chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN10: 0–415–38312–9 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–38313–7 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–38312–7 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–38313–4 (pbk)
We dedicate our book to Nick Pretzlik whose kindness
and cheerful support we remember with great
pleasure
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Series editor’s preface xiii
Acknowledgements xv
Part I
What is the issue? 1
1 Morphemes and literacy: A starting point 3

PETER BRYANT AND TEREZINHA NUNES
2 What knowledge of morphemes do children and

adults show in the way that they spell words? 35
TEREZINHA NUNES, PETER BRYANT, URSULA PRETZLIK,
DEBORAH EVANS, DANIEL BELL, AND JENNY OLSSON
PART II
What does the research tell us? 63
3 From the laboratory to the classroom 65

PETER BRYANT, TEREZINHA NUNES, URSULA PRETZLIK,
DANIEL BELL, DEBORAH EVANS, AND JENNY OLSSON
4 An intervention program for teaching children

about morphemes in the classroom: Effects on
spelling 104
FREYJA BIRGISDOTTIR, TEREZINHA NUNES, URSULA PRETZLIK,
DIANA BURMAN, SELLY GARDNER, AND DANIEL BELL
viii Contents
5 An intervention program for classroom teaching

about morphemes: Effects on the children’s
vocabulary 121
TEREZINHA NUNES, PETER BRYANT, URSULA PRETZLIK,
DIANA BURMAN, DANIEL BELL, AND SELINA GARDNER
6 Can we increase teachers’ awareness of

morphology and have an impact on their pupils’
spelling? 134
JANE HURRY, TAMSIN CURNO, MARY PARKER, AND
URSULA PRETZLIK
PART III
What are the overall implications? 155
7 Morphemes and literacy: Context and

conclusions 157
TEREZINHA NUNES AND PETER BRYANT
Appendix 183
The four research strategies in this research program
PETER BRYANT AND TEREZINHA NUNES
References 191
Index 195
Illustrations
Figures
1.1 The first two pages of a 71⁄2-year-old girl’s story 26
1.2 Overgeneralizations of the “-ed” ending by a 71⁄2-year-old
boy 28
2.1 Percentage of children who spelled each suffix (“-ion”,
“-ness”, and “-ed”) correctly, by age level 39
2.2 Percentage of children who spelled each suffix (“-ion”
and “-ian”) in words and pseudowords correctly, by age
level 41
2.3 On the left: Number of correct spellings of regular and
irregular verbs in the past and nonverbs ending in /t/ or
/d/. On the right: Generalization of “-ed” to the wrong
words 45
2.4 Proportion of past regular verb endings spelled correctly
and produced correctly for pseudowords in an oral task 49
2.5 Pictures of dinosaurs with their names, which the children
were asked to spell 52
2.6 Proportion of word and pseudoword pairs whose stems
were spelled in the same way at each age level 53
2.7 Proportion of real verb endings spelled correctly with
“-ed” and proportion of stems spelled consistently across
two words 55
2.8 Percentage of correct pseudowords with “-ion” and “-ian”
spelled correctly and percentage of correct explanations,
by age level 57
2.9 Percentage of correct spellings of one-morpheme and
two-morpheme words, by age level 60
3.1 Design of the first teaching study 68
x Illustrations
3.2 The mean number (out of 16) of correctly spelled “-ion”

and “-ian” endings in real words in Study 1 79
and “-ian” endings in pseudowords in Study 1 80
and “-ian” endings in real words in Study 2 84
and “-ian” endings in pseudowords in Study 2 85
3.6 Items from a task used to make children aware of how
places in a sentence frame define grammatical
categories 89
3.7 Examples of items used to teach the category of
prefixes that refer to number 91
3.8 Focusing on verbs 92
3.9 Examples of items used to practice identification of
stems and creation of person words. Playing with
pseudowords was fun 93
3.10 Adjusted means at pretest and for both posttests
by group for the correctness of spelling suffixes in
Study 3 100
3.11 Adjusted means at pretest and for both posttests by
group for the spelling of suffixes in pseudowords in
Study 3 101
4.1 The adjusted mean scores on the test of spelling
suffixes in words (out of a maximum of 26) on each
testing occasion for each group 111
4.2 The adjusted mean scores on the test of spelling
polymorphemic words (out of a maximum of 61) on
each testing occasion for each group 112
4.3 The adjusted mean scores on the spelling of suffixes in
pseudowords (out of a maximum of 12) on each testing
occasion for each group 116
4.4 The adjusted mean scores on the test of spelling suffixes
in words (out of a maximum of 26) on each testing
occasion for each intervention group by achievement
group in the pretest 118
5.1 A description and two sample items from the vocabulary
test 125
5.2 Mean scores (adjusted for pretest differences) in the
vocabulary test for each testing occasion and group
(maximum score = 40) 129
Illustrations xi
5.3 Mean scores by testing occasion and group (adjusted

for pretest differences) in the vocabulary test for
children who scored up to the median (left) or above
(right) in the pretest 130
5.4 Percentage of correct pseudoword definitions (adjusted
for pretest differences) by group and testing occasion 131
5.5 Percentage correct in the pseudoword-definition test
(adjusted for pretest differences) by group and testing
occasion 132
6.1 One-year teacher follow-up 148
6.2 Children’s scores on spelling test: A comparison of
morphology, National Literacy Strategy, and standard
conditions 149
7.1 Writing of a 6-year-old boy who seems to attribute to the
digraph “ck” the function of the split digraph “V+C+e” 171
Tables
2.1 Number of children in each year group and their mean
age 39
2.2 Proportion of use of “-ion” and “-ian” spellings for each
of the types of word and pseudoword 42
3.1 Mean age and standard deviation for the intervention
and control groups in Study 1 68
4.1 Mean age in years (and standard deviation) by type of
group 106
5.1 Number of children, mean age in years (and standard
deviation) by year group in school and type of group in
the project 124
6.1 Number of children in each teaching condition, by year
group 146
6.2 Children’s average scores before the course, by teaching
condition and year group 147
6.3 Average percentage increase in the children’s scores by
the end of the course, by teaching condition and year
group 147
Boxes
1.1 A crash course in roots and stems (and bases) 5
1.2 A crash course in affixes 5
xii Illustrations
1.3 How psychologists measure morphological awareness 11

1.4 A collision course with schwa vowels 17
2.1 Children’s spellings of “-ness” and “-ion” by year group in
school 38
3.1 The word- and pseudoword-spelling tasks used in
Studies 1 and 2 69
3.2 The analogy game 71
3.3 The correction game 74
3.4 The items used for the word- and pseudoword-spelling
tests in Study 3 95
3.5 Sample of items from the spelling test showing one
child’s answers 97
4.1 Examples of suggestions for discussion used to focus on
spelling used with the morphemes-plus-spelling group,
which were added to the basic activities in the
morphemes-only group 108
4.2 Examples of the segmentation used in scoring the
word- and pseudoword-spelling tests 113
4.3 A sample of the same boy’s spelling in the pretest and
posttest 114
5.1 The instructions and the items in the pseudoword-
definition task 127
6.1 Teachers talking about “-ed” endings 136
6.2 Lack of awareness of “-ed” rule 137
6.3 Teachers thinking about morphemes with connection to
meaning 138
6.4 Teachers thinking about morphemes without connection
to meaning 139
6.5 Teachers talking about “-ion” 141
6.6 Theories about morphology and spelling 143
Series editor’s preface
The Improving Learning series showcases findings from projects within

the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning
Research Programme (TLRP), the UK’s largest ever coordinated edu-
cational research initiative.
Books in the Improving Learning series are explicitly designed to
support “evidence-informed” decisions in educational practice and
policymaking. In particular, they combine rigorous social and edu-
cational science with high awareness of the significance of the issues
being researched.
Working closely with practitioners, organizations, and agencies
covering all educational sectors, the program has supported many of the
UK’s best researchers to work on the direct improvement of policy and
practice to support learning. Over sixty projects have been supported,
covering many issues across the life course. We are proud to present the
results of this work through books in the Improving Learning series.
Each book provides a concise, accessible, and definitive overview
of innovative findings from a TLRP investment. If more advanced infor-
mation is required, the books may be used as a gateway to academic
journals, monographs, websites, etc. On the other hand, shorter
summaries and research briefings on key findings are also available
via the program’s website at www.tlrp.org.
We hope that you will find the analysis and findings presented in
this book are helpful to you in your work on improving outcomes for
learners.
Andrew Pollard
Director, TLRP
Institute of Education, University of London
Acknowledgements
As we wrote this book, we became steadily more aware of the huge

effort by very many colleagues—researchers, teachers, and illustra-
tors—and many institutions that made this publication possible.
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) was the major
supporter of the intervention studies through the Teaching and Learning
Research Programme (Grant #L139251015). A previous ESRC grant
(#R000237752) and two others by the Medical Research Council
(MRC) (G9214719 and G9900004/ID 47376) also gave us essential
support for the investigations that made it possible for us to develop the
interventions. We are very grateful for the support of these research
councils, without which the research reported here would not have been
possible.
Many teachers and children in different schools participated in the
longitudinal phases of this work. In Oxford: Wolvercote First School,
Botley Primary School, Cassington Primary School, Kennington Primary
School. In London: William Tyndale Primary School, Honeywell Infants’
and Junior School, Ravenstone Primary School, and Trinity St. Mary’s
Church of England School. Miriam Bindman and Gill Surman worked
in this initial project and were excellent collaborators.
The early stages of the development of interventions received the
inestimable cooperation of teachers and children in eight schools in
London and thirteen schools in the Oxford area. In London: Bessemer
Grange Primary School, Dulwich Hamlet Primary School, Hargrave Park
Primary School, Brecknock Primary School, Honeywell Primary School,
Lauriston Primary School, St. Joseph Roman Catholic Primary School,
and St. Michael Church of England Primary School. In Oxfordshire:
St. Nicholas Primary School in Abingdon and Wheatley Primary School
in Wheatley; and in Oxford: St. Nicholas, Marston, Bayswater Middle
School, Larkrise Primary School, Marston Middle School, SS Philip and
xvi Acknowledgements
James Primary School, East Oxford Primary School, Frideswide Middle

School, St. Andrews Primary School, Cutteslowe Primary School, New
Hinksey Primary School, and Woodfarm Primary School.
The Directors of the Hillingdon Cluster of Excellence, Rodney Stafford
and Peter Shawley, as well as the teachers and children in the schools
that participated in the collaboration with Oxford Brookes University
supported the largest part of the intervention studies carried out in the
classroom. These were Brookside Primary School, Charville Primary
School, Cherry Lane Primary School, Colham Manor Primary School,
Grange Park Infant School, Grange Park Junior School, Longmead
Primary School, Minet Infant School, John Penrose Primary School,
Pinkwell Primary School, Wood End Park Primary School, and Yeading
Junior School.
We are very grateful to all these teachers and children whose
participation made our research possible.
Very special thanks are directed to our colleagues and long-time
collaborators in Lauriston Primary School, including the Principal,
Heather Rockhold, whose rock-solid collaboration for more than ten
years has taught us so much. Her team over these years included Hillary
Cook and Sue Dobbing, who worked alongside us in each project,
Gwenan Thomas, Aidan O’Kelly, Natasha Nevison, Alison Rosica, and
Aaron Bertran. We feel privileged to have been able to work with them
for so long. They were occasionally, but not always, supported by
Department for Education and Skills (DfES) Best Practice grants, which
helped them to develop their research skills and to analyze their practice
in greater depth.
The teachers who attended the morphology course were also truly our
partners in this research, testing their children, marking and entering
data, teaching the interventions, nagging us about the rigor of our
research and the management of the intervention sessions. Participant
teachers and schools were: Maggie Bacon, Nick Bonell, Kay Croft, Karen
Henry (Kingswood Primary); Louisa Lochner (Gateway); Kathy
Thornton (Kingsgate Primary); Stephen Buzzard (New End Primary);
Lucinda Midgely (Linton Mead Primary); Rachel Webber (Waterside
Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (SEBD) Primary);
Sameena Bashir (Fullwood Primary School); Karen Bloomfield (Coppice
Primary School); Caroline Havers (Mayespark Primary School); Carina
Mcleod (Cleveland Junior School); Caroline Rogers (Beckford Junior
School); Sophia Shaikh, Barbara Turner (Woodlands Junior School);
Deborah Walters (Christchurch Primary School); Nathalie Allexant
(Gallions Primary School); Bryony Roberts (Edith Neville School).
Acknowledgements xvii
All the teachers who participated in our research were tremendously

generous with their time and endlessly patient as we interviewed them,
videoed their lessons, asked them questions during their lunchtime,
tested their children, organized twilight meetings with them and asked
for their feedback and suggestions.
Our assessments and interventions included illustrations that led to
greater enjoyment by the children. Eldad Druks drew the dinosaurs for
our pseudoword testing, and Adelina Gardner did all the illustrations
for all the remaining materials. We, and the children, were fortunate to
benefit from Addy’s talents and imagination.
So many children generously agreed to give their time freely so that
other children in the future could benefit from what they helped us to
find out. Their participation was essential and made our work in schools
great fun.
So, THANK YOU EVERYONE!
Part I
What is the issue?

Chapter 1
Morphemes and literacy

A starting point
We all know that words have meanings, but not everyone under-
stands that the meaning of any word depends on its underlying
structure. Words consist of morphemes, which are units of meaning.
These morphemes, in our view, are of immense importance in
children’s learning of the meaning of new words and also in their
learning how to read and write familiar and novel words. The
aim of our book is to show how important morphemes can be in
children’s education and how easy it is to enhance their knowledge
about morphemes and thus to increase the richness of their
vocabulary and the fluency of their reading and writing.
What morphemes are

Take a fairly simple word like “unforgettable”. Its meaning is clear and
widely understood, but the word has three different parts to it, and it
is the combination of these three parts that gives the word its final and
overall meaning.
The three parts to “unforgettable” are “un-” and “forget” and “-able”.
“Forget” is actually a verb, because it refers to an action. Putting “-able”
on the end of this verb makes it into an adjective (“forgettable”), which
tells us that one can easily forget the person or event that the adjective
is describing. The addition of “un-” at the beginning of the adjective
gives it the opposite meaning: The new adjective (“unforgettable”)
means that it is impossible to forget someone or something.
Remove one of these parts, and the word either takes on a different
meaning or has no meaning at all. Each of the three parts in
Authored by Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes

4 What is the issue?
“unforgettable” therefore is a unit of meaning. The technical term for a

unit of meaning is a “morpheme”. Some words contain one morpheme
only, but many other words in English and in other languages contain
more than one. “Forget” is a one-morpheme word, “forgettable” a two-
morpheme word and “unforgettable”, as we have seen, contains three
morphemes. So, when more than half a century ago thousands of people
crooned the popular Nat King Cole song “Unforgettable”, they were
repeating a three-morpheme word whose meaning they understood
perfectly, though they may not have been completely aware that the
word had three separate units to it or that these units were called
morphemes.
In general, people do have some awareness of morphemes, although,
as we shall be showing later on in the book, this awareness tends to be
hazy and incomplete. Nevertheless, we can easily work out the meaning
of entirely new words if these words are combinations of morphemes
whose meaning we already understand. All of us immediately knew
what Toni Braxton meant when we heard her desperate, but charming,
plea “Unbreak my heart, uncry my tears”. None of us had met the word
“uncry” before, but because we knew that adding “un-” to the beginning
of a word reverses the meaning of this word (“untie”, “untidy”, “unfor-
gettable”) we could grasp what the singer meant, and, at the same time,
we could see that she was asking for a physical impossibility.
There are different kinds of morpheme. One distinction of great
importance is between roots or stems (see Box 1.1) and affixes (Box
1.2). Every word with more than one morpheme in it contains a root,
and this is combined with one or more than one affix morpheme (see
Boxes 1.1 and 1.2 for a more detailed description of these morphemes).
The word’s meaning starts with its root in the sense that the word would
be meaningless without this particular morpheme. “Forget” is the root
morpheme in “unforgettable” and “un-” and “-able” are both affixes.
Affixes that precede the root are called “prefixes” and those that follow
the root are called “suffixes”. These are the only kinds of affix that
we have in English, but other languages, such as Swahili, also have
“infixes”, which are added-on morphemes that appear in the middle of
the root.
Another essential distinction is between “derivational” and “inflec-
tional” affixes. Inflectional-affix morphemes, or “inflections” for short,
tell us what kind of a word we are dealing with—whether it is a singular
(“cat”) or a plural (“cats”) noun, a present (“kiss”) or a past (“kissed”)
verb, an adjective (“kind”) or a comparative (“kinder”) or a superlative
(“kindest”) adjective. So, the “-s” at the end of “cats”, the “-ed” at the
Morphemes and literacy: A starting point 5
end of “kissed” and the “-er” and “-est” at the end of “kinder” and
“kindest” are inflections, and they combine with the root to produce
two-morpheme words with a root and an affix.
BOX 1.1
A crash course in roots and stems (and bases)

There is a distinction to be made between roots and stems, although
from the point of view of this book it is not a particularly important
one. The root is the basic part of the word that remains when
all derivational and inflectional affixes have been removed. For
example, “teach” is the root for the word “teacher” and also for the
word “unteachable”. The stem, on the other hand, is the part of the
word that remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed.
“Teacher” therefore is the stem for “teachers”. Thus, sometimes the
root and the stem are the same, but sometimes they are different.
“Cat” is both the root and the stem for the plural word “cats”, but
“teach” is the root and “teacher” the stem for the plural word
“teachers”. In all the examples and the tasks that we shall describe
in this book, the roots and the stems are always identical, which
is why the distinction is not an important one as far as this book is
concerned.
The base or base word is another related term and it is relevant to
our book. This refers to the word from which a complex word is
derived (for example, “touchable” is the base for “untouchable”).
Thus in the word “unbearable”, “bear” is the root, “bearable” is the
base, and “un-” is the derivational prefix.
BOX 1.2
A crash course in affixes

In English, affixes are morphemes that are attached to the stem or
the root of a word (see Box 1.1 for the distinction between stems and
roots). These affixes either come before the root or follow it. Those
that come before the root are called prefixes and those that follow it
are suffixes.
There are two types of affix: Inflectional and derivational affixes.
Inflectional affixes, or inflections, give you essential information about
the word. For instance, all nouns are either singular or plural, and in
English the presence of an /s/ or a /z/ sound at the end of a noun
usually means that the word is in the plural, whereas its absence
usually signals that it is a singular noun. This end sound is the plural
inflection. When you hear the word “cats” or the word “dogs” the
inflection at the end of each word tells you that it refers to more
than one animal. Similarly, the absence of the “s” at the end of an
English noun means, in most cases, that the noun is a singular one.
There are inflections in English for nouns (the plural “-s” and the
possessive “-’s”), adjectives (the comparative “-er” and the
superlative “-est”), and for verbs (the past tense “-ed”, the third-
person singular in the present tense (“-s”) and the continuous tense
(“-ing”). All inflections in English are suffixes.
Many other languages, such as French and Greek, are much more
inflected than English. In these other two languages, for example,
there are plural inflections for adjectives as well as for nouns. Some
languages also mark gender in adjectives as well as nouns with
inflections.
Derivational affixes are different. Adding a derivational affix to
a word creates a different word, which is based on the original word
but not the same. Sometimes the difference between the base word
and the derived word is that they belong to different grammatical
classes: For example, the derivational suffix “-ness” changes adjectives
into abstract nouns ( for example “happy”–“happiness”) and the
suffix “-ion” changes verbs, again, into abstract nouns (for example,
“educate”–“education”). The suffix “-ful” changes nouns into
adjectives (for example, “help”–”helpful”, “hope”–”hopeful”). Other
derivations such as “un-” and “re-” bring about a radical change in
the meaning of the base words to which they are attached (for
example, “un-helpful”, “re-born”) but do not affect their grammat-
ical class. Some derivational affixes are prefixes and others suffixes.
Derived words include the base word from which they are derived
but in many cases the pronunciation of the base word changes
in the derivation, as in “fifth”, which is derived from “five”, and
“electricity” which is derived from “electric”.
Derivational morphemes create new words based on old ones.

“Un-”, which, as we have seen, reverses the meaning normally given to
the root that it precedes, is a good example of a derivational morpheme.
So is the suffix “-able”, which we have met once already at the end
of “unforgettable” and which appears at the end of many other English
words, such as “unbearable”. Consider the relatively new coinage of the
word “doable” (do-able), which we ourselves have heard our students
and our builder use: “It’s doable”, they say, and we instantly under-
stand what they mean, even though they often turn out to be wrong.
This suffix is a derivational morpheme because it changes the word from
the verb, represented by the base word, to an adjective, which says that
the action referred to by the verb is entirely possible.
By now you should know, if you did not know before, how many
morphemes there are in “education” or in “uneducated” (there are two
in the first word and three in the second). You should be able to work
out whether the affix at the beginning of “incompetent” and the affix at
the end of “kisses” are derivational or inflectional (derivational in
“incompetent” and inflectional in “kisses”). You should also have noted
that there is a strong connection between morphemes and grammar:
You can use the “-ed” at the end of verbs, in order to convey the meaning
of past tense, but you cannot use the “-ed” ending with nouns; nouns
don’t have a past tense. Once you are completely clear about roots and
affixes, prefixes and suffixes, and derivations and inflections, we know
that you will want us to justify our claim that these morphemes play
a crucial but neglected role in children’s development and in their
education.
Before we move on to the next section where we will begin to
make this claim in earnest, we should like you to ponder why P. G.
Wodehouse’s joke about the word “disgruntled” is so very funny. He
wrote of a man who was consumed with anger: “If not actually
disgruntled, he certainly wasn’t gruntled”. This understatement is
amusing because although he followed strict morphemic principles,
Wodehouse managed to create a word that we never use. The mor-
pheme “dis-”, like the morpheme “un-”, reverses the meaning of the
base that it is attached to, and so “gruntled” should be the opposite of
“disgruntled”, but this is an unused word. We know both these things,
and it is the tension between them that makes us laugh.
Wodehouse’s joke helps us make another point about morphemes,
which is that morphemes and grammar, these inseparable friends, form
a basis on which we build the learning of new words. Philosophers,
linguists, and psychologists have pondered at the marvel that it is to
learn a word with all that this learning implies. If a mother points to a
dog sniffing the lamp post, and says to her baby “Look at the dog”, how
is the child to know that the mother means by “dog” the animal and not
the action that the dog is performing?
The U.S. child psychologist Roger Brown suggested that children
use grammatical information contained in the sentences in forming an
idea about what a new word means (Brown 1957). In the sentence
“Look at the dog”, the article “the” gives a clue that the word is a noun,
not a verb, and this helps them come up with the dog, rather than the
action, as the meaning for the word “dog”. Brown’s studies actually
required much more from the children than the distinction between
nouns and verbs. He created a technique, which we will use often in our
research, of observing how children learn a made-up word. The reason
for studying how children learn made-up words, which are called
“pseudowords” or “nonsense words” by researchers, is that because the
word is made up by the researcher, we can be certain that the child has
not come across it before—just like “gruntled” in Wodehouse’s joke.
To clarify how the technique works, consider one of the examples
used by Brown in his research. He showed children in the age range 3–5
a picture of a pair of hands kneading a strange substance in a strange
container. To some children he said “In this picture you can see some
sibbing”; to other children he said “In this picture you can see some
sib”; to a third group of children he said: “In this picture you can see
a sib”. The children who were told “some sibbing” should conclude that
“sibbing” refers to the action; those who were told “some sib” should
conclude that “sib” refers to the substance; those who were told “a sib”
should conclude that “sib” refers to the container. Each of the children
was then shown three pictures, one that depicted the same action on a
different substance and with a different container, one depicting the
same substance but a different action and container, and one depicting
the same container but a different substance and action. The children
were able to choose the correct picture more often than one would
expect if they were just guessing. With three pictures to choose from, if
they were just guessing they could be right one-third of the time, but
they were right more than two-thirds of the time for any of these
different presentations.
Later work by many other researchers interested in children’s learning
of vocabulary (see further readings by Gleitman and colleagues:
Gleitman 1990, Gleitman and Gleitman 1992) confirmed that children
do use their implicit knowledge of grammar in learning vocabulary.
They referred to this idea as the “Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis”,
to indicate that children use grammar to help narrow down the meaning
of words.
Because of the strong connection between grammar and morphemes,
and because morphemes are units of meaning, it is reasonable to
expect that morphemes help us to learn new words even when these
are not in the context of sentences, and thus we cannot use grammar
to bootstrap word learning. There is some, albeit limited, evidence for
this. It is known that older children, in the age range 11–13, learn
the definitions of pairs of pseudowords better if the pseudowords share
a stem (for example “flur” and “flurment”) than if they do not. This
indicates that they can use what they learned about one stem when
learning the derived pseudowords—that is, they can use morphemic
bootstrapping, not only syntactic bootstrapping.
In summary,
• Words are formed with units of meaning, termed morphemes.

• Morphemes and grammar are strongly connected because inflec-
tional morphemes can only be applied to particular grammatical
categories and derivational morphemes are used to form words of
particular grammatical categories.
• Research shows that morphemes are not just ways in which
linguists analyze words: People use knowledge of morphemes and
grammar to learn the meanings of new words.
Why are morphemes important in education?

For our answer to this question we turn to children’s explicit knowledge
or awareness of the language that they speak and to which they listen.
We shall argue that schoolchildren need to become explicitly aware of
principles of language, which at earlier ages they learned and obeyed
at an implicit level only. Once at school they need to develop explicit
knowledge of language, in general, and of morphemes, in particular,
which they can think about and can even talk about much more openly
and explicitly than they had before.
We shall be arguing that schoolchildren need this new explicit
knowledge about morphemes for two main reasons. One is that it is
essential in learning to read and to spell. The other is that morphemic
knowledge plays a central role in the growth of schoolchildren’s
vocabulary, because large numbers of the words that they have to learn
at school are derived (with the help of derivational morphemes) from
other words.
The main purpose of the rest of this book will be to provide evidence,
mostly from our own research, that these propositions are right, but
before we do that we shall say more about what made us think that
they might be right in the first place. We need to tell you first:
• why we concluded that children’s knowledge of morphemes is

at first implicit and that there might be ways of increasing the level
of children’s explicit knowledge about these units;
• why explicit knowledge of morphemes may be an essential ingre-
dient of learning to read and to write;
• why children also need explicit knowledge about morphemes to
keep to a respectable level of vocabulary growth while they are at
school.
Implicit and explicit knowledge of morphemes

Young children begin to understand and to use morphemes from an
early age. English-speaking children usually begin to produce two-
morpheme words in their third year and during that year the growth
in their use of affixes is rapid and extremely impressive. This is the
time, as Roger Brown showed, when children begin to use suffixes for
possessive words (“Adam’s ball”), for the plural (“dogs”), for present
progressive verbs (“I walking”), for third-person singular present
tense verbs (“he walks”), and for past tense verbs, although not always
with complete correctness (“I brunged it here”) (Brown 1973). Notice
that these new morphemes are all of them inflections. Children tend to
learn derivational morphemes a little later and to continue to learn
about them right through childhood, as we shall show in later chapters.
Nevertheless, from their third year on, with little or often no explicit help
from other people, they master the system of roots, prefixes, and suffixes
with ease. By the time that they go to school they are morphemic
experts. They are, to derive a new word, morphemists.
They are experts, however, only at an implicit level. They are soon at
a loss when given quite simple tasks that need some explicit judgment
about morphemes. These tasks do not require children to know anything
about the terms that we set out in the previous section (morphemes,
roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc.), but they do require the children to reflect
about some fairly basic morphemic similarities between words, and
young children find them very hard indeed.
One such task is a simple analogy task that we devised ourselves and
gave to a large group of children in the 6–9 age range (Nunes et al.
1997b). Our aim in this task was to find out how well individual children
can transform a present-tense verb into a past-tense one, or vice versa.
So, we said a sentence like “The dog is scratching the chair” to a puppet,
who “repeated” it, transforming the verb into a past-tense one: “The
dog scratched the chair”. Immediately after that, we said another very
similar sentence, also with a present-tense verb—“The dog is chasing the
cat”—and we asked the children to say it back to us, but like the puppet
would say it. We wanted to see if the child, as the puppet had done with
the previous sentence, could change the verb by removing the present-
continuous-tense inflection “-ing” and adding instead the past-tense
inflection “-ed” to make the new sentence, “The dog chased the cat”.
The task was straightforward and contained no technicalities. We
did not ask the children to write anything and so they had no reason
to worry about spelling. All that they had to do was to remove the
present-continuous inflection and add the past-tense inflection instead.
However, this apparently simple task was quite difficult even for many
of the oldest children in the group. We found that 6-year-old children,
all of whom could spontaneously produce present- continuous- and
past-tense verbs in the right places in their own speech, only managed
to get 31 percent of the items right in this morphological test. For the
7-year-old group this figure rose to 41 percent and for the 8-year-olds
to 56 percent. So, children get better at this task as they grow older, but
even the oldest make many mistakes.
Many other “morphological awareness” tasks that were invented by
our team and still others that were devised by other research teams
have produced the same results. Most young schoolchildren fluently
speak and effortlessly understand words that are quite complicated from
a morphemic point of view. Yet, they are usually completely, albeit quite
cheerfully, at sea when asked to make simple comparisons of the
morphemes in different words. Box 1.3 presents a sample of different
tasks used to assess children’s awareness of morphology.
BOX 1.3
How psychologists measure morphological

awareness
The aim of all morphological awareness tasks is to measure children’s
or adults’ conscious knowledge of the morphemic structure of
spoken words. There is a wide variety of such tasks.
Productive morphology (Nunes et al. 1997a,

adapted from Berko 1958)
The tester says two sentences, which contain an entirely unfamiliar
pseudoword and then invites the child to complete a sentence using
that pseudoword with the target inflection. Each item is presented
along with a picture. The picture used for the first item is included
here to illustrate the method.
1. This is a man who knows how to snig; he is snigging onto his

chair. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do
yesterday? Yesterday he?
2. This is a person who know how to mab along the street.
Yesterday he mabbed along the street. Every day he does the
same thing. What does he do every day? Every day he?
3. This person is always tigging his head. Today, as he falls to the
ground, he tigs his head. Yesterday he did the same thing. What
did he do yesterday? Yesterday he?
4. “Be careful,” said the farmer. “You’re always clomming on your
shoelace. You’re about to clom on it now.” Yesterday you?
5. Ever since he learned how to do it this man has been seeping
his iron bar into a knot. Yesterday he sept it into a knot. Today
he will do the same thing. What will he do today? Today he will?
6. This is a zug. Now there is another one. There are two of them.
There are two?
7. This is a nuz. Now there is another one. There are two of them.
There are two?
8. It was a bazing day. He felt very bazed. He stuck out his hands
and shouted with?
9. It was night-time and the moon was shining. He danced luggily
and smiled with lugginess. He felt very?
10. When the sun shines he feels very chowy. He dances chowily
and laughs with?
The sentence analogy task (Nunes et al. 1997a)

The tester uses puppets to present the sentences. The first puppet
“says” the first sentence in the pair; the second puppet “says” the
second sentence. Then the first puppet says the first sentence in the
second pair and the child is encouraged to help the second puppet
and say its sentence. Each item presents the corresponding pairs.
1. Tom helps Mary : Tom helped Mary :: Tom sees Mary : ________
2. Jane threw the ball : Jane throws the ball :: Jane kicked the ball
: ________
3. The cow woke up : The cow wakes up :: The cow ran away :
________
4. The dog is scratching the chair : The dog scratched the chair ::
The dog is chasing the cat : ________
5. I felt happy : I feel happy :: I was ill : ________
6. Bob is turning the TV on : Bob turned the TV on :: Bob is
plugging the kettle in: ________
7. She kept her toys in a box : She keeps her toys in a box :: She
hung her washing on a line : ________
8. Bob gives the ball to Ann : Bob gave the ball to Ann :: Bob sings
a song to Ann: ________
The word analogy task (Nunes et al. 1997a)

The tester uses puppets to present the words. The first puppet “says”
the first word in the pair; the second puppet “says” the second word.
Then the first puppet says the first word in the second pair and the
child is encouraged to help the second puppet and say its word.
Each item presents the corresponding pairs.
1. anger : angry :: strength : ________

2. teacher : taught :: writer : ________
3. walk : walked :: shake ________
4. see : saw :: dance ________
5. cried : cry :: drew ________
6. work : worker :: write : ________
7. sing : song :: live ________
8. happy: happiness :: high : ________
Test of morphological production (Fowler and

Liberman 1995, adapted from Carlisle 1988)
The children are either presented with the base form and have to
use the derived form in a sentence (for example, “Four. The big
racehorse came in ________”) or they are given the derived form
and have to produce the base form (for example, “Fourth. When
he counted the puppies, there were ________”). The word pairs
either fit into the phonologically neutral or phonologically complex
condition. The same suffix was used for each pair to make the
conditions more comparable.
Phonologically neutral Phonologically complex

danger : dangerous courage : courageous
shine : shiny anger : angry
four : fourth five : fifth
agree : agreeable respond : responsible
examine : examination combine : combination
suggest : suggestion decide : decision
There is one apparent exception to this run of rather negative results,

and it is an instructive one. In 1958 Jean Berko, a U.S. child psy-
chologist, did a classic experiment in which she used pseudowords (as
did Roger Brown) like “wug” to avoid testing children’s specific
knowledge and thus to arrive at some conclusion about their knowledge
of morphemic principles (Berko 1958). In her best-known question,
she showed 4- to 7-year-old children a picture of an unfamiliar creature,

told them it was a “wug” and then showed them a picture of two of the
same creatures and asked them to describe it. Most children, down to
the age of 4, produced the correct answer of “wugs”, and from this Berko
concluded that they knew about the nature of the plural “-s” inflection.
The children were as successful in their answers to some other
questions that involved past verbs. For example, referring to a man
exercising, Jean Berko told the children “This is a man who knows how
to gling. He is glinging. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he
do yesterday? Yesterday, he,” . . . and then she asked the children to
complete the sentence. Even children who were still too young to go
to school came up, for the most part, with the appropriate “glinged”
in answer to her question. So, Berko argued, even pre-schoolchildren
are explicitly aware of the past-tense inflectional morphemes as well as
of the plural ending.
Yet, some other results from the same Berko study gave the lie to this
optimistic claim. When the children were asked to make singular
nonsense words with /s/ or /z/ sound endings into plural words (for
example “niz”–“nizzes”), and present-tense nonsense verbs ending in /t/
or /d/ sounds into past verbs (for example, “mot”–“motted”), they
nearly always failed to do so. It was as if the children had some vague
idea that plural words end in /s/ or /z/ sounds and that past verbs end
in /t/ or /d/ sounds, and yet do not understand that plural words consist
of two parts: the root or stem (see Box 1.1), which is the same as the
singular word, and the added /s/ (“cats”) or /z/ (“dogs”) or /iz/
(“kisses”) sound, which signals that the word is in the plural.
In the same study, Berko also tried to get the children to use deriva-
tional morphemes on nonsense words, but she found that the children
were strikingly unsuccessful. For example, she asked the children, and
some adults too, what would they call a man whose job is to “zib”. All
the adults formed a new noun by adding a derivational suffix “-er” to
form a new word, “zibber”, but only 11 percent of the children were able
to come up with this word. They simply found it too difficult to
consciously derive an agent from a verb.
The answer to our first question about young schoolchildren’s
explicit (as opposed to their implicit) morphemic knowledge is therefore
mostly negative. When children arrive at school and during their first
few years there, they have some awareness of the morphemic system,
which they themselves use in their own conversations with extra-
ordinary proficiency. But this awareness is only a weak one. Morphemes
are an essential part of the young children’s everyday life, but these
youngsters are barely conscious of them or of their importance. What

implications does this have for the learning that they have to do at
school?
Explicit knowledge of morphemes may be an

essential ingredient of learning to read and
to write
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. This kind of knowledge may not be an absolute
requirement for learning how to read and write English, Portuguese,
Greek, French, German, Arabic, and Hebrew, but it certainly will make
this learning an easier and a more successful task.
The main reason why morphemic structure is so important for reading
and writing in these and in many other languages is that morphemes
affect the ways in which words are spelled. If you want to know what
many written words are, particularly new words, and if you want to
know how to write words, and, again, new words in particular, you
really have to be able to work out their morphemic structure.
Morphemes have such a powerful effect on spelling for three good
reasons, which we shall look at in turn.
1. The same sounds are spelled in different ways in different

morphemes.
2. It is often the case that a particular morpheme is spelled in the same
way, even though it is represented by different sounds in different
words.
3. Some morphemes are represented in writing but not in speech.
The same sounds are spelled in different ways in different

morphemes
The first of these points needs particular attention from those who are
tempted to think that the be-all and end-all of teaching children to
read is to encourage them to learn about the relationship between
sounds and letters or sequences of letters. This doctrine is no help at all
to a child who wants to know why the ending of “locks” and “fox” sound
exactly the same and yet are spelled quite differently from each other.
The reason for the difference is a morphemic one. The first word has two
morphemes and its final /s/ sound is the plural inflection, which is
represented by “-s” in regular plural words in English. The second word,
“fox”, on the other hand, is singular and therefore there is no reason to
break up the /ks/ sound at the end. In such words, this ending is
represented by an “-x” as in “fox” or “-xe” as in “axe”.
For precisely the same reason, the final /z/ sound in “trees”
and “freeze” is spelled quite differently in the two words. “Trees” is a
two-morpheme plural word and so its /z/ ending is represented by
“-s”, the conventional spelling for the plural inflection. “Freeze” is a
one-morpheme word and the /z/ sound ending is spelled as “-ze”. This
actually is a clear and inflexible principle in English spelling: Take every
word that ends with a /z/ sound and you will find that this ending
is always spelled as “-s” in plural words and always as “-zz” (“jazz”) or
“-ze” (“froze”) or “-se” (“rose”) in one-morpheme words (Kemp and
Bryant 2003).
So far, we have contrasted two- with one-morpheme words, but it is
easy to show rather similar effects of morphemes on spelling in contrasts
between different two-morpheme words. The point here is that there
are affix morphemes that have quite different functions and yet sound
exactly the same. Sometimes these different affixes are spelled in the
same way, like the “-er” ending. When “-er” represents an affix, it is a
comparative (“bigger”, “braver”, “cleverer”) in some words and an
agentive in others (“baker”, “sweeper”, “cleaner”).
No problem there, but what about the “-ion” and “-ian” endings in
“education” and “magician”? These endings sound exactly the same (if
you don’t believe this, say both words out aloud and listen carefully),
but they are spelled quite differently. Both ending syllables contain a
schwa vowel followed by the /n/ sound. (See Box 1.4 for an explanation
of schwa vowels and for an object lesson in why children need to know
about morphemes when they are learning to spell.)
BOX 1.4
A collision course with schwa vowels

Educationalists and psychologists are fond of the term “spelling
demons,” a term that they use to describe words whose spelling
flouts conventional spelling rules. In our view, however, the worst
demon in English spelling is not a word, but a particular sound. This
is the schwa vowel sound, which, to take one pair as an example, is

the last sound both in “Bognor” and in “picture”. The schwa vowel
is easily the most frequently used vowel sound in the English
language, and yet there is no set way of spelling it on the basis of
letter–sound rules. It is also known as a “weak” vowel sound—one
that is rather poorly articulated.
Schwa vowels crop up in profusion in words of more than one
syllable, and they are always in the unstressed part of the word. Here
are some examples of words with one or more schwa vowels:
“happiness” (schwa vowel in the last syllable)

“election” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“magician” (schwa vowel in first and last syllables)
“hasten” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“glorious” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“attraction” (schwa vowel in first and last syllable)
“psychology” (schwa vowel in third syllable)
“bigger” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“painter” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“embarrassment” (schwa vowel in third and fourth syllables)
“incredible” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“unforgettable” (schwa vowel in the last two syllables)
“rehearsal” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“banana” (schwa vowel in first and last syllables)
“onion” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“tomato” (schwa vowel in first syllable)
“Stilton” (schwa vowel in last syllable)
“exaggerate” (schwa vowel in third syllable)
“photography” (schwa vowel in the first and third syllables).
It may come as something of a surprise that the twenty-four

vowels that we have pinpointed in this list are all the same vowel
sound, since the sound is spelled in so many different ways in the
different words. But with a moment’s reflection, and perhaps with
the help of pronouncing the words out loud, you will see that they
are all one and the same sound. The variety of ways in which this
sound is spelled in English is truly astonishing. In this small list
we counted six different spellings for the schwa vowel (“a”, “e”,
“o”, “ia”, “ia” and “ou”), and there are many other spellings for this
promiscuous vowel.
This range of spellings for the same sound is as good an illustration
as one can possibly find for the inadequacy of treating or teaching
English spelling as a system of rules about letter–sound relationships
with a few exceptions. With the schwa vowel there is no letter–sound
rule. At the level of phonology, every spelling is an exception.
On another level, however, which is the level of morphemes, there
is a set of principles that can guide the spelling of this sound in very
many words. These are morphemic spelling principles. Look again
at the list and you will see that the first thirteen words (“happiness”
to “rehearsal”) are all two- or three-morpheme words with a stem
or base followed by a suffix, and with a schwa vowel in each suffix.
The spelling of each of these thirteen endings is highly consistent
across different words with the same suffix (“glorious” and “furious”,
“magician” and “logician”, “happiness” and “sadness”) and when
two different suffixes sound exactly the same they are sometimes
spelled differently (“attraction” and “mathematician”). Thus, the
spelling of the schwa vowel is often determined by the meaning,
rather than the sound, of the word. Meaning, and the morphemes
which convey that meaning, can often tame this particular spelling
demon.
There must be some reason for this difference in the spelling of these
two affixes, and the chances are that it is a morphemic one, since these
written endings usually do represent morphemes. Yet none of the tomes
on English spelling, no educational textbook, nor any one of the many
accounts of the psychology of reading and spelling provide any kind of
a clue to the reason for the two different spellings for this ending, even
though the schwa vowel followed by an /n/ is a very common ending,
which is notoriously hard for children to spell.
In fact, there is a clear and rather simple principle for spelling this
ending with nouns. If the noun refers to a person or an animal, its ending
is spelled as “-ian” (“magician”, “mathematician”). If it does not refer
to a person, it is spelled as “-ion” (“education”, “institution”). There are
hardly any exceptions to this principle, and these few exceptions are all
words that are quite uncommon ones (“radian”, “centurion”).
This is a distinction that should cause no particular difficulty to 7- and
8-year-old children. Teachers, therefore, should be able to put it across
to their pupils quite easily. Yet, as far as we know, no one teaches our
principle about “-ion” and “-ian” endings in schools in England, and, as
the next chapter will show, the pupils continue to make frequent and
rather serious mistakes when writing words that ought to have one or
the other of these two endings.
The “-ion”/“-ian” issue is something of a test case for us. We are
interested in morphemic spelling principles and, particularly, principles
that could be, but are not, taught at school. We are also interested in
spelling patterns that cause children great, and possibly quite unnec-
essary, difficulties. The “-ion”/“-ian” endings fit both these requirements
and raise two clear and pressing questions:
1. Can schoolchildren be taught this morphemic spelling principle?

2. Will this teaching help them to spell these difficult words?
We shall present our answers to these questions in the chapters that

follow.
It is worth mentioning at this point that the same questions can be
asked about other languages. In Portuguese there are several instances
of the same sound being spelled in different ways in different mor-
phemes. For example, the endings of the words “princesa” (“princess”)
and “pobreza” (“poverty”) sound exactly the same (they both rhyme
with the English word “blazer”), but they are spelled differently because
the “-esa” ending is the right one for the derivational morpheme that
represents a female, while the “-eza” ending is the conventional spelling
in abstract nouns that end with that suffix.
In modern Greek, which is known as a highly regular script, children
still have to learn to pay particular attention to morphemes (Aidinis
and Nunes 2001, Bryant et al. 2000). They need to do so because the
Greek language has few vowel sounds and many ways to spell them.
For example, there are many different ways to spell the “ee” vowel
sound, as in “feet”, in Greek words, which becomes a problem for Greek
children because they have to learn which spelling to choose for this
sound in different words. The best help that Greek children get in
making this choice is from morphemes (Bryant et al. 1999, Chliounaki
and Bryant 2003). Greek root morphemes are always spelled in the
same way, of course, and so whole families of words always use the
same spelling for the vowel or vowels in the root that they have in
common. Also, different Greek inflections are spelled differently even
when they sound the same (as with “-ian” and “-ion” in English). Four
different inflections are signalled by the “ee” sound at the end of Greek
words and there is a different way of spelling each of them. The spelling
for feminine singular endings on nouns and adjectives is η, for masculine
plural endings is οι, for neuter singular endings is ι and for third-person-
singular present-tense verb endings is ει.
It is often the case that a particular morpheme is spelled in

the same way, even though it is represented by different
sounds in different words
The central point of this chapter is that in English and in many other
languages there is a system of relationships between morphemes and
spelling and that it will help children immensely to know what this
system is. One of the most compelling reasons why schoolchildren need
to know about this system is that in many cases there is a constant
spelling for a particular morpheme, even though the sound of that
morpheme differs from word to word.
For instance, we take medicines to heal ourselves, and we worry about
our health. These two words share the same root morpheme, and the
spelling for this morpheme is the same in both words even though the
vowel sound is long in the one-morpheme word, “heal”, and short in the
two-morpheme word, “health”. “Muscle” and “muscular” form a similar
pair: the “sc” sequence represents one sound, /s/, in the first word but
two, /sk/, in the second. The reason for this apparent inconsistency in
letter–sound correspondences is that the two words share the same root.
The relationship between letters and sounds is inconsistent, but the
relationship between letters and morphemes is entirely consistent. Once
again, if we are going to teach children the principles of English spelling,
we shall have to tell them about morphemes too.
In affix morphemes as well we can find consistent connections
between spelling sequences and morphemes, despite inconsistent
connections between these same spelling sequences and sounds. The
past-tense ending in verbs is the most powerful example, and an
interesting one from our point of view, because it is one of the few
connections between morphemes and spelling that teachers tell their
pupils about at school. In regular past verbs there are three different
pronunciations for the past-tense ending /t/ as in “kissed”, /d/ as in
“killed”, and /id/ as in “waited”. Yet we spell all three endings as “-ed”,
despite the notable differences in the ways that we pronounce them.
In the next chapter, we shall see that children take a long time to get
to grips with this particular spelling principle, despite being taught
about it in the classroom. One problem for them is that they have to
distinguish not just between past verbs and similar-sounding words

that are not verbs (“peeled” versus “field”; “kissed” versus “list”) but
also between regular and irregular past verbs (“tipped” versus “slept”;
“frowned” versus “found”).
Some morphemes are represented in writing but not in

speech
Morphemes are important in reading and writing for a third reason,
which is that some morphemic distinctions are explicit and clearly
signaled in writing but not in speech. In some ways, this point is at least
as important for children’s acquisition of spoken language as it is for
their learning about written language, because it is entirely possible
that they may eventually become aware about these particular
morphemic distinctions in speech through seeing them in print.
The apostrophe, which is notorious for the difficulties that it causes
adults and children alike, is a case in point. In the English script it
represents either an elision (“can’t” for “cannot”; “it’s” for “it is”) or the
possessive (“the boy’s cousin”; “the girls’ teacher”). The possessive
ending is an affix morpheme, and so we will concentrate on that for the
moment.
We mention the possessive apostrophe at this point because it
makes an explicit morphemic distinction that spoken language fails
to do (Bryant et al. 2000). The two phrases “the boys drink” and “the
boy’s drink” have entirely different meanings in their written form. In
one phrase, “boys” is a plural noun and “drink” refers to what they are
doing. The other phrase is about a boy in the singular and “drink” is a
noun. Both these fundamental differences are signaled simply by the
absence of an apostrophe in one passage and its presence in the other.
In spoken language it would be quite a different matter: Although the
two passages have quite different meanings, they sound exactly the
same. Of course, listeners who hear one of the passages would soon be
able to infer what the person speaking to them had meant by it, but
they would have to use the context to do that. The spoken words on their
own are ambiguous; the written words are not.
Precisely because writing represents a distinction here which spoken
language does not, we should expect it to be quite hard for people to
learn about the possessive apostrophe. In fact, many people, and not just
greengrocers, have real difficulties with this morphemic spelling:
Adults’, as well as children’s, knowledge of when and when not to use
the apostrophe is often distinctly sketchy.
Lest you should think that we are dealing with a peculiarity of the
English language here, we shall show you now that the French written
language also signals morphemic distinctions that are completely
hidden in spoken French. Plural endings in French nouns, adjectives,
and verbs are for the most part silent. The word for “house” sounds
exactly the same in the plural as it does in the singular (“la maison”, “les
maisons”), even though the two forms have different spellings, and this
is true of most other nouns as well. It is the same with verbs: Third-
person singular, and plural verbs have exactly the same sound /e/ in the
present tense (“il aime”, “ils aiment”) but are spelled differently. Thus,
the plural affix appears in writing as “-s” at the end of plural nouns and
adjectives and as “-nt” at the end of plural verbs, but not in speech.
These “silent” plurals cause French schoolchildren a lot of difficulty
when they first learn to write. In an intriguing series of studies, Michel
Fayol, a French psychologist, and his colleagues have clearly shown a
sequence in the way that children learn to spell plural nouns, adjectives,
and verbs (Fayol, Hupet, and Largy 1999, Fayol, Thenevin, Jarousse,
and Totereau 1999). There are four steps in this sequence.
1. At first, young French-speaking schoolchildren simply leave the

plural ending out: They write the words as they sound, and, since
the plural endings have no sound, they do not represent them in
their spelling at all. So, they usually make the mistake of writing
“les arbres”, for example, as “les arbre”.
2. Later on, they do learn about the plural “-s” ending, but they tend
to use it altogether too frequently, since they often put it at the end
of verbs as well as at the end of plural nouns and adjectives. They
write “ils aimes” instead of the correct “ils aiment”.
3. Next, they learn about the “-nt” ending as well, but again their
use of this ending is often indiscriminate. Sometimes, they put
the “-nt” ending on some nouns and adjectives too. For instance,
they sometimes write “les maisonent” instead of the correct “les
maisons”.
4. Finally, and usually with the help of a great deal of instruction in
the classroom, they manage to make the distinction between plural
noun and verb endings.
We cannot be surprised by the problems that French-speaking children

have with learning how to represent in writing a morpheme that they
do not hear in speech. But their pain may be worthwhile, for it is quite
likely that French-speaking children learn a lot about these silent
morphemes from seeing them so explicitly there in print. Through

seeing and writing these plural endings, they should become much more
aware than they were before of singular and plural distinctions in
spoken language as well.
Cause and effect in the connections

between children’s knowledge of
morphemes and their learning to spell
morphemes
Our last point about the effect on French-speaking children of finding
out about morphemes through learning how to spell raises a general
question about the direction of cause and effect. In most of this chapter
we have been emphasizing possible causes and effects in one direction
only. We have argued that children’s knowledge about morphemes must
be a powerful and necessary resource in learning to read and write.
Morphological knowledge, according to this view, should have a strong
effect on children’s reading and spelling. Now we should also consider
the possibility that cause and effect might take the opposite direction
as well. Learning to read and write might alert children to morphemic
distinctions that had escaped them before: Their experiences with
written language also cause a change in their explicit awareness of
morphemes.
The idea of a two-way street—from reading and writing to mor-
phemic knowledge as well as from morphemic knowledge to reading
and writing—is at its most plausible when morphemic distinctions are
explicit in writing but hidden in speech, as happens with the possessive
apostrophe in English and with plural endings in French. But it might
also be true of morphemic distinctions that are explicit both in written
and in spoken language. Here, too, children’s experiences with written
language might alert them to the structure of morphemes in spoken
language.
Before we find out whether the street is a two-way one, we first
have to establish whether the street exists at all. Is there evidence for
a connection between children’s morphological knowledge and the
progress that they make in learning to read? Fortunately, such evidence
does exist, and in such abundance that we can only review some of
it here. In the U.S.A., for example, Joanna Carlisle gave children a
morphological production task (see Box 1.3 for a description of this
task) and related it to a measure of their reading comprehension
(Carlisle 1995). She found that the first-grade children’s scores in this
morphological task were quite strongly related to the level of their

reading comprehension a year later when they were in the second grade.
Anne Fowler and Isabelle Liberman, two U.S. psychologists, also found
an impressive relationship between children’s success in a morpho-
logical production task and their reading levels (Fowler and Liberman
1995). From Denmark, Carsten Elbro reported a high correlation
between the number of mistakes that children made with inflections in
a Danish version of Jean Berko’s task and the mistakes that they made
in reading inflected words in a written text (Elbro 1989). In France,
Séverine Casalis and Marie-France Louis-Alexandre also found that
kindergarten children’s scores in a variety of morphological production
tasks predicted their progress in reading two years later at school
(Casalis and Louis-Alexandre 2000). One interesting aspect of this last
study was that the morphology tasks dealt both with inflectional and
derivational morphemes and the scores with the inflectional items did
a much better job of predicting reading than the scores with the
derivational problems. This pattern of relations would almost certainly
be different in the case of older children. The inflectional system is far
less varied than the derivational system, and young children are more
likely to understand and use their knowledge of inflections when
reading than their knowledge of derivations.
We could go on, but we think that we have said enough to make the
point that a relationship between morphological knowledge and literacy
does exist. Now we can consider the question of the direction of cause
and effect in this relationship.
Some of the evidence on this question comes from a study that we
ourselves carried out several years ago (Nunes et al. 1997a, 1997b).
This was a longitudinal study in which we looked at the same children’s
spellings over a 3-year period. We were interested in children’s spelling
of inflections, in particular of the past tense “-ed” inflection, and we
studied how their spelling of this morpheme changed as they grew older
and how these changes were related to their knowledge of morphemes.
Let us begin with the first question: How does children’s spelling of
the past-tense morpheme change over time? The children’s ages at the
beginning of the study ranged from 6 to 9 years. So, by the end of the
project, the youngest children were 9 years old and the oldest were 12
years old. We found that during this period their spelling of the past-
tense inflections changed radically. The very youngest children’s spelling
of past verbs, as of other words, was often quite unsystematic. However,
we found that as soon as their spelling of past-tense endings became
consistent, it invariably followed the same pattern. These children began
Figure 1.1 The first two pages of a 71⁄2-year-old girl’s story.
by spelling the ending phonetically and, therefore, incorrectly. Figure

1.1 illustrates this phonetic spelling, using a child’s free writing of a
story. “Pikt” for “picked”, “opund” for “opened” and “suckt” for “sucked”
are mistakes familiar to the point of banality to anyone who works with
young schoolchildren, but they are no less important for that. These
mistakes clearly show children obeying one kind of spelling principle
and ignoring another. Their use of phonologically based spelling
principles is ingenious but too pervasive. Their complete disregard for
morphemically based spelling principles is obvious. The “-ed” spelling
transgresses phonological correspondences, and so they ignore it.
Later on this changes. It is hard to assign a particular age to this
change, for it varies so much between children, but usually, according
to our results, children begin to put the “-ed” ending on past verbs some
time between the ages of 7 and 8. At first they do so with some regular
past verbs and not with others. However, the really interesting thing
about their initial sporadic use of the “-ed” ending is that they often also
put it at the end of quite inappropriate words, as well as on regular past
verbs, where it belongs. Figure 1.2 gives an example of how a very
typical 71⁄2-year-old boy spelled a set of words for us, many of which
ended in /t/ or in /d/. Some of these words were past verbs such as
“sold”, “slept” and “told”, but others, like “next”, were not. Notice that
this boy used the “-ed” ending but often put it at the end of non-verbs.
So he writes “next” as “necsed” and “direct” as “direced”. In our project
we worked with over 350 children, and the majority of them made such
mistakes at some time during the study.
Figure 1.2 Overgeneralizations of the “-ed” ending by a 71⁄2-year-old boy.
What is going on here? Our interpretation is that at this stage children

are still treating the “-ed” sequence as some kind of a letter–sound rule.
They pick up the idea that “-ed” is another way of representing the
sound /t/ or /d/ at the end of a word, but they have no idea about
the morphemic significance of this spelling pattern, and so they put
it on the end of nouns and adjectives as well as of regular past verbs.
It is as though they have to learn about the actual spelling and have to
practice using it for some time before they tumble to its connection
to the past-tense morpheme.
Children make these “overgeneralizations”, as we call them, for a
while, but later on they do learn to confine the “-ed” spelling to past
verbs. For some time they continue to use the ending with irregular past
verbs as well as regular ones, writing “slept” as “sleped” for instance,
but at least this is a grammatically appropriate kind of mistake in a way
that “necsed” is not. They even manage quite well to use the “-ed”
ending with entirely unfamiliar past-tense pseudoverbs (“Yesterday he
prelled his car”) and not with other pseudowords (“There is a preld at
the end of the road”). Thus they eventually learn a genuine morphemic
spelling principle: That “-ed” is the correct spelling for the regular past-
tense ending.
This brings us to the second question. How is this development
related to children’s morphemic knowledge? In our study we used three
main measures of this knowledge. The first was the “sentence analogy
task” that we described earlier in the chapter. In this the child heard a
sentence followed by a transformed version of the same sentence
(present to past verb, or vice versa); then the child heard another
sentence, rather similar to the first one, and had to transform this
sentence in the same way as the first sentence had been transformed
(see Box 1.3).
We called the second task “word analogy”. This was much like the
sentence task. The child heard a word and, after it, a transformation
of this word (for example, “teacher”; “taught”); then the child was
given another word and asked to make the same transformation to it
(“writer”; ?) (see Box 1.3).
The third task was based on Berko’s morphological study. We called
it the “productive morphology task.” We gave the children pictures and
we used pseudowords as part of our description of what was going on
in the pictures. So, for example, one picture showed a man performing
an unusual action and a little story, which the child had to complete by
using the pseudoword we had used to describe the action (see Box 1.3).
In this example, we said, “This is a man who knows how to snig. He is
snigging onto his chair. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he
do yesterday? He”, . . . and the child was encouraged to produce the
pseudoverb in the past tense.
Our project was a longitudinal one, which means that we saw and
tested the same children many times over the 3-year period. So we
were able to see how well each of our various measures was related
to other measures over time. Time is important in analyzing these

relationships. If, for example, a child’s morphemic knowledge does
determine how well she or he learns morphemic spelling principles, a
good measure of different children’s morphemic knowledge taken early
on in the project should predict how well children will learn these
spelling principles later on. If A determines B, A should precede B, and,
therefore, the strength of A at one time should predict the strength of
B later on.
In fact, if you are examining how much one variable determines
another over time, you have to take one extra step to be sure your
hypothesis is right. Suppose, for example, that you want to see if the
strength of children’s morphemic knowledge in one session (Session 1)
has an effect on how much they have learned about morphemic spelling
rules in a later session a year or so on (Session 2). Your hypothesis is
really about the changes in the children’s learning of morphemic rules
between the two sessions and not about how much they had learned
about these rules at the beginning of the project. So you have to rule
out the effect of their earlier knowledge of these spelling rules. The way
to do this is to control for differences among the children in how well
they knew the morphemic spelling rules in Session 1 before you examine
the relationship between their morphemic knowledge in Session 1 and
their use of the morphemic spelling rules in Session 2. This statistical
maneuver, which is called autoregression, may sound a complicated
one. In fact, it is quite easy to do.
We used this way of analyzing relations between our different
measures over time in our study. First, we looked at the relationship
between our measures of morphemic knowledge at the beginning of
the project and the children’s success in spelling at the beginning of the
project and also 18 months later. We found that the children’s scores
for morphemic knowledge in the first session predicted their success
in spelling the past-tense inflection 18 months later, even after we had
controlled for their spelling prowess in the first session. We concluded
that this was strong evidence that morphemic knowledge plays a role
in how well children learn about morphemic spelling rules. This is
not a surprising discovery, but it is an important one because of its
implications for teaching spelling, which of course is the subject of this
book. If morphemic knowledge partly determines how well children
learn morphemic spelling principles, one should take seriously the
possibility that steps should be taken to increase children’s explicit
awareness of the morphemic structure of the words that they speak and
hear and read and write.
The discovery that A affects B does not rule out the possibility that B
also affects A. Taking regular exercise may make people happier and
more relaxed than before, but being happy and relaxed may make
people more inclined to take exercise rather than mope around at home.
So, morphemic knowledge probably does affect how well children learn
about morphemic spelling rules, but it is also possible that intensive
experience with morphemic spelling rules could increase children’s
awareness of how words are constructed from morphemes. Here we
might find a two-way street.
Our data suggest that this too is true. We also looked at the rela-
tionship between children’s success in spelling the past-tense ending
at the beginning of the project and their morphemic knowledge in
later sessions. There was, it transpired, a strong predictive relation there
too, even after we had controlled for differences among the children in
their morphemic knowledge in the first session. So, our results suggest
a strong and thriving two-way relationship between these different
aspects of children’s linguistic knowledge.
Our confidence in the existence of this two-way connection was
strengthened by a similar study of a very different language and script.
Iris Levin, Dorit Ravid, and Sharon Rapaport worked with 5- to 6-year-
old Israeli children, who were just starting to read and write Hebrew
(Levin et al. 1999). In Hebrew the morphological system is rich and
complex, and its effect on Hebrew spelling is at least as pervasive and
important as the effect of English morphology on English spelling. So,
it is useful to see if the relationships between children’s morphological
knowledge and their literacy skills are much the same in this language
as in English.
The purpose of the project was to track these relationships over a
7-month period. At the beginning, and also at the end, of the project
the researchers measured the children’s knowledge of morphemes in
spoken Hebrew by asking them to transform words morphemically. An
example (translated from Hebrew to English) from one of their tasks
is “A baby who looks like an angel is an ________ baby.” Here the child
has to derive an adjective (“angelic” in English) from the noun “angel”,
and in Hebrew as in English this means that they have to find and add
the appropriate derivational suffix. The research team also measured
the children’s progress in writing Hebrew at the same time. In Hebrew,
as in English, children tend to concentrate on the phonological prin-
ciples (grapheme–phoneme correspondences) before they adopt more
complex correspondences such as the correspondences between
morphemic units and spelling. In this project the measures of children’s
progress in writing Hebrew charted the extent to which they had

progressed from using basic phonological principles to the more difficult
principles based on morphemes.
This project clearly established a “two-way street,” to use the
researchers’ own term, which we have already borrowed. The Israeli
children’s knowledge of morphemes at the beginning of the project
predicted their level of writing at the end of the project, even after
controls for initial differences between the children in their writing
skills. There were also strong relationships in the opposite direction:
The children’s level of writing at the beginning of the project predicted
their knowledge about morphemes in spoken Hebrew at the end of the
project, even after controls for differences between the children at the
start of the project in their knowledge about Hebrew morphemes. This
impressive set of results establishes that in this language, too, children’s
sensitivity to the way in which words are constructed from morphemes
and the progress that the children make in literacy interact and
strengthen each other. It is a relationship of the greatest importance in
English and in Hebrew, and, almost certainly, in many other languages
as well, and it needs to be nurtured.
Teaching morphology: Improving spelling

The mention of “nurturing” brings us to our final question in this
chapter, which is about how to “nurture” children’s understanding
and use of the valuable morphemic spelling rules. The evidence that
we have been reviewing suggests very strongly that one good way of
helping children to learn about morphemic spelling principles would be
to bolster their morphological awareness. Yet, tests of this simple idea
are remarkably thin on the ground.
This gap really is surprising because any study in which the
researchers manage to improve children’s morphological awareness and
then go on to examine the effect of doing so on the children’s learning
of the correspondence between morphemes and spelling could yield
two most valuable insights. The first insight would be into the causal
relationship between these two. If the study establishes that teaching
morphological awareness leads to an improvement in spelling, it will
have provided the strongest evidence possible for the causal hypothesis
that we have been considering. But the second insight is even more
important than that, and it is the subject of this book. A successful
intervention study like this would have immediate educational sig-
nificance. It would establish how possible and practicable it is to teach
children about morphemes, and it would show us whether this sort of

instruction does have beneficial effects on children’s spelling and,
perhaps, on their vocabulary as well.
Most of the rest of this book (Chapters 3–6) will be about a series
of intervention studies that we carried out on the effects of raising
children’s morphological awareness. The results of a previous project of
ours on the effects of teaching children about morphemes (Nunes et al.
2003) encouraged us to embark on this new program of research. In this
study, we made a direct comparison of the effects of teaching 7- and
8-year-old children about morphemes or about phonology.
We gave the children a pretest before the intervention and an
identical posttest soon after the intervention was finished, in which we
tested their ability to spell certain affixes, such as “-ion” and “-ment”,
which normally cause children of this age a great deal of difficulty, and
also to follow particular phonologically based spelling principles, such
as how to represent short and long vowels.
In the intervention itself, we taught the children in small groups in
twelve different sessions. We taught some groups about morphological
distinctions and others about phonological ones, and we also included
a control group of children in the study to whom we gave no teaching.
We made sure that the activities given to the “morphological” and to
the “phonological” groups had the same structure. So, for example, the
children blended either morphemes or phonological segments, made
analogies either about morphemes or about sounds, and classified words
into groups that shared the same morphemes or shared the same
sounds.
Our morphological teaching did have a powerful effect, particularly
on the children’s success in spelling affixes. The study established, we
think for the first time, that it is possible to teach children about
morphemes and that this teaching has a direct effect on their knowledge
and use of morphemic spelling principles. The way was clear for us to
begin the program of studies that started in the laboratory and ended
in the classroom. These are the studies that we shall tell you about in
Chapters 3–6.
Summary and conclusions

Our review of the ways in which morphemes and written language
are connected has led us to three simple conclusions.
continued
1. Some of the most important links between spoken and written

language are at the level of the morpheme. The morphemic
structure of words in English and several other written languages
often determines their spelling.
2. The system of morphemes, therefore, is a powerful resource for
those learning to read: The more schoolchildren know about
morphemes, the more likely it is that they will learn about
spelling principles based on morphemes.
3. However, children’s knowledge of morphemes is largely implicit.
It is quite likely that they need explicit knowledge about
morphemes in order to learn about the connection between
morphemes and spelling. Yet, many quite simple morphemic
spelling principles are not taught at school. We need to know
how easy it is to teach these principles explicitly and how
effective this teaching will be.

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Improving Literacy by

Words consist of units of meaning, called morphemes. These morphemes

Terezinha Nunes is Professor of Educational Studies at the University

Peter Bryant is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Oxford Brookes

Series Editor: Andrew Pollard, Director of the ESRC Teaching and

Improving Learning How to Learn: Classrooms, schools

Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes

Improving Schools, Developing Inclusion

Improving Subject Teaching: Lessons from research in

Improving Workplace Learning

ISBN10: 0–415–38312–9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–38312–7 (hbk)

1 Morphemes and literacy: A starting point 3

2 What knowledge of morphemes do children and

3 From the laboratory to the classroom 65

4 An intervention program for teaching children

5 An intervention program for classroom teaching

6 Can we increase teachers’ awareness of

7 Morphemes and literacy: Context and

3.2 The mean number (out of 16) of correctly spelled “-ion”

5.3 Mean scores by testing occasion and group (adjusted

1.3 How psychologists measure morphological awareness 11

The Improving Learning series showcases ﬁndings from projects within

As we wrote this book, we became steadily more aware of the huge

James Primary School, East Oxford Primary School, Frideswide Middle

All the teachers who participated in our research were tremendously

What is the issue?

Morphemes and literacy

What morphemes are

Authored by Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes

“unforgettable” therefore is a unit of meaning. The technical term for a

A crash course in roots and stems (and bases)

A crash course in afﬁxes

Derivational morphemes create new words based on old ones.

• Words are formed with units of meaning, termed morphemes.

Why are morphemes important in education?

• why we concluded that children’s knowledge of morphemes is

Implicit and explicit knowledge of morphemes

How psychologists measure morphological

Productive morphology (Nunes et al. 1997a,

1. This is a man who knows how to snig; he is snigging onto his

The sentence analogy task (Nunes et al. 1997a)

The word analogy task (Nunes et al. 1997a)

1. anger : angry :: strength : ________

Test of morphological production (Fowler and

Phonologically neutral Phonologically complex

There is one apparent exception to this run of rather negative results,

she showed 4- to 7-year-old children a picture of an unfamiliar creature,

youngsters are barely conscious of them or of their importance. What

Explicit knowledge of morphemes may be an

1. The same sounds are spelled in different ways in different

The same sounds are spelled in different ways in different

A collision course with schwa vowels

is the schwa vowel sound, which, to take one pair as an example, is

“happiness” (schwa vowel in the last syllable)

It may come as something of a surprise that the twenty-four

1. Can schoolchildren be taught this morphemic spelling principle?

We shall present our answers to these questions in the chapters that

It is often the case that a particular morpheme is spelled in

distinguish not just between past verbs and similar-sounding words

Some morphemes are represented in writing but not in

1. At first, young French-speaking schoolchildren simply leave the

We cannot be surprised by the problems that French-speaking children