Blast from the Past: Is Morphology Training Better Than Phonics Instruction?

Blast from the Past

This entry first posted in September 2017. Blasts from the Past make blogs available to new audiences and afford me the opportunity to reiterate points or to reconsider my earlier claims. This site is dedicated to improving reading instruction through a close consideration of research. But research is an ongoing enterprise. Anyone who takes a principled stand based on science had better be prepared to dine on crow occasionally. This is one of those times. Accordingly, I have not rewritten this entry but hope to correct it with new prefatory and end notes. Perhaps comparing my current views with those originally expressed will illustrate what the impact of science should be.

A good deal of research on the value of morphology instruction has appeared since this blog first posted. These newer studies have strengthened the case for a larger and earlier place — and a broader purpose — for morphology instruction. As this blog pointed out, most research on morphology teaching showed that it increased vocabularyKnowledge of the meaning and pronunciation of words. knowledge and improved the comprehensionMaking meaning from something that is heard (oral comprehension) or from print (reading comprehension). of older students. That is still true, and yet, increasingly studies reveal an impact on decodingThe ability to translate a word from print to speech by using your knowledge of sound–symbol (letter) correspondences. and spelling with younger students and struggling readers. I still advocate for the primacy of phonics instruction in getting kids into the game, and that word knowledge should only take up a quarter of the instructional attention. Phonics and morphology though different, both contribute to the abilities to decode from print to pronunciation and spelling. Phonics is a simpler place to start, but morphology can begin to contribute early on. Peter and Jeffrey Bowers have been wise to argue for the early and ongoing inclusion of morphology in word studyInstruction that focuses on close investigation of words. and for its ability to improve decoding — though possibly at times they have overstated these claims. In any event, I wish I’d paid more attention to it when I taught first grade.

The original blog entry included no references, this one is chock full! If you want to know what changed my mind, read this literature.
 

Man, sometimes when you publish a blog entry you’d wish you stayed in bed.

You hope to write something that someone will find useful. But the responses might make you feel more like you’ve been dropped onto the set of Fox News or MSNBC.

Recently, I’ve been smacked upside the head by several readers upset with me for not proposing more, and more thorough, spelling instruction and morphology instruction focused on spelling with the aim of improving decoding skills.

Some of those arguments have been energetic.

Traditional phonics instruction emphasizes letters and sounds but ignores the morphological and etymological reasons for spellings, my critics have pointed out. Reading experts have long recognized the importance of the morphological aspects of word meanings, but there has been little pedagogy aimed at the morphological aspects of spelling.

I’ve been sent lots of linguistic evidence to convince me of the morphological nature of our spelling system — and most of that work cites Dick Venezky’s seminal contributions.

In the 1960s, when computers first allowed for the large-scale quantitative study of language, Dick revealed the surprising consistency inherent in the English spelling system. Contrary to what had long been believed — that English spelling was a confusing mess — Venezky argued that whatever was lost in ease of pronunciation, was more than regained in the consistency of meaning inherent in our spellings. Hence, the endings of dogs and cats may be pronounced differently: /z/ and /s/, but their identical spelling consistently and helpfully signals plurality.

I’m happy to see that Dick’s work continues to bear fruit in linguistics (he was one of my teachers and friends — he even helped me to design morphology-oriented spelling measures for my doctoral dissertation). But I think he’d be surprised to hear his work used as an argument against phonics instruction — he was a big phonics proponent (though he too could be pretty critical about the designs of some popular phonics programs).

Dick not only had expertise in linguistics but extensive knowledge of psychology and computer science. He knew that teaching kids to read was different than inputting a linguistic system into a computer. Despite the flaws and shallowness of many (most) phonics programs when it comes to features like morphological sophistication, phonics teaching gives students a clear learning benefit.

What Dick Venezky came to believe was that phonics instruction gave students “clues” to the English spelling system. Students then rely on those clues to figure out how the system works. Phonics instruction does not teach everything one would need to “decode” text — kids are not electronic computers, but it provides them with useful pointers and puts students into a mindset of trying to recognize patterns and understand the system.

That doesn’t mean he would — or that we should — reject the idea of introducing morphological explanations and “clues” earlier in the curriculum, only that we shouldn’t be so sure that it would improve things as much as morphology proponents seem to assume.

For example, one colleague pointed out that in some phonics programs, kids are taught to divide the syllables of “action” in the following manner: ac/tion. He argued that this was a bad choice because it obscures that the root word is “act.” That’s correct linguistically, but does it matter when you’re seven?

Initially, we hope to teach kids enough to allow them to come up with an approximate pronunciation of a word that is already in their mental lexicons (primary grade kids know 5,000-10,000 words). It is more likely they’ll come up with “action” by saying “ak/shun” then by saying “act/ion.”

Of course, if they don’t know the word action — don’t know what the word action means — then, breaking the word in the second way (emphasizing “act”) may just get them to the meaning no matter the pronunciation.

The issue here turns on what would be best for beginning readers… is it best to help them to figure out the meanings of unknown words or to help them to translate print to pronunciations of words already in their oral languageCommunication through speaking and listening. ? I think it is the latter, so I don’t mind delaying most morphological work until phonics is mastered (e.g., Words Their Way).

However, there are arguments that we should teach morphology earlier and even in place of phonics instruction (one critic wrote that the National Reading Panel findings were out of date since we now know morphological training to be more beneficial than phonics). Eek!

I looked at these critics’ evidence (Bowers & Bowers, 2017 provides a nice summary of this work). Specifically, there are two studies of morphological training for young children. One especially weak study — impossible to tell if the outcomes were due to the training or to existing ability differences in the participants — claimed long-term benefits to preschool morphology training.

The second was an experimental study that examined the impact of 10 hours of morphology teaching: This one claimed to enhance reading performance by more than a grade level! Not surprisingly, the outcome measures used were tightly aligned to the training and there were other design weaknesses, too.

That’s the entire body of instructional research one could use to prescribe instruction for preschool and primary grade kids (and in both studies, everyone got lots of phonics instruction, too — not exactly proof of the inadequacy of phonics).

Again, I can’t really say these folks are wrong — we might be able to affect clear reading improvement by teaching the morphological aspects of spelling earlier and more thoroughly, instead of what we currently provide with phonics.

But I won’t be prescribing reading instruction based on a single 10-hour study.

The reason why I insist that we teach phonemic awarenessThe ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. , phonics, spelling, vocabulary (word meanings including morphology), oral reading fluencyFluency is the ability to read a text accurately, at a good pace, and with proper expression and comprehension. , reading comprehensionThe ability to understand what you are reading. strategies, and writing is because there are dozens, even hundreds, of studies done by different researchers, with different kinds of kids, with different variations on the instructional routines, but with a consistent and substantial learning payoff. Why trust 100 such studies on phonics — some carried out for as long as 3 years — over a single small study of 10 hours of morphology instruction? I think you can probably answer that one for yourself.

I hope researchers will continue to propose provocative hypotheses about learning, and that they’ll continue to evaluate these ideas rigorously under a broad array of instructional conditions. And, if they find something that consistently helps kids, then I hope we’ll adopt their ideas. Until then, I won’t be recommending morphology over phonics or other terrific but unproven ideas — no matter how intelligently, reasonably, or vociferously those opinions may be stated. 

Note posted April 12, 2025

Although this blog opposed much early attention to morphology, my views have changed as new evidence has accumulated. Most of this research has focused somewhat later in the primary grade sequence, so I still contend that it makes sense to start by teaching students to translate print to pronunciation (some form of phonics). However, I am increasingly being convinced that the early introduction of morphology make sense. Morphology teaching should be introduced even when explicit phonics instruction is still being taught. Gradually the proportion of word reading instruction should shift from phonology to morphology. The judicious approach would be to include some simple morphology lessons as early as kindergarten, increasing them as the new vocabulary (and spelling demands) justifies. What we need now are evaluations of experimental morphology curricula to help us understand how best to accomplish this.

References

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