What does the research say about teaching morphology?

In an excellent presentation by researcher Danielle Colenbrander (ACAL), she outlined the findings from a recent meta-analysis of the research on the effects of teaching morphology on reading, spelling and reading comprehension outcomes. There were so many interesting aspects to this study. Firstly, although teaching morphology has impact on word reading and spelling, there does not seem to be a direct impact on reading comprehension.

The thorny question of transfer was explored. Transfer in this context is the ability to use the taugfht aspects in new situations. There was no evidence of transfer in reading words.  But in spelling, the studies showed that students could use the taught bits of spelling when writing new spellings.

As yet, we do not have the evidence to know when we should start teaching morphology to young readers – there were very few studies which directly compared phonics teaching with morphology.

Finally, there was one big problem with how the studies were reported  – many of them lacked  specific detail of the teaching included in them. Without this detail it is really hard to know what happened and more importantly, what are the bits that work.

So, although we know that teaching morphology is important – the how, when, to whom and in what ways have yet to be explored.