Recurrent Prefixes, Roots, and Suffixes: A Morphemic Approach to Disciplinary Literacy

Students in a content-area reading course examined the vocabulary of each of their disciplines, focusing on recurrent roots and affixes. They wanted to become teachers of math, science, English, music, and history; therefore, they needed to learn discipline-specific morphemes so they could help thei...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of adolescent & adult literacy Vol. 58; no. 7; pp. 561 - 567
Main Author Mountain, Lee
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Wiley-Blackwell 01.04.2015
Subjects
Comprehension
Content Area Reading
Literacy Education
Morphemes
Preservice Teachers
Reading Strategies
Suffixes
Teaching Methods
Vocabulary
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Summary:Students in a content-area reading course examined the vocabulary of each of their disciplines, focusing on recurrent roots and affixes. They wanted to become teachers of math, science, English, music, and history; therefore, they needed to learn discipline-specific morphemes so they could help their future students figure out new words in their content areas. The students: (1) analyzed words in their disciplinary vocabularies, using recurrent roots and affixes to aid in comprehension of word meaning; (2) adapted traditional reading strategies for disciplinary use; (3) discovered that many roots and affixes which were seemingly particular to one discipline also contributed to the meanings of words in other disciplines; and (4) designed content-area lessons using a morphemic approach. The class learned that teaching the meanings of morphemes could improve disciplinary literacy and could also help with vocabulary in other content areas.
ISSN:1081-3004
DOI:10.1002/jaal.394