Here's a simple linguistic diagram that can be helpful to show how a word is derived from other words called a Derivational Tree Diagram. These simple diagrams make it easy for students to witness how a word can "grow" from previous lexemes or morphemes. These linguistic trees are especially helpful to show students how to parse (1) Words with lots of suffixes or prefixes, or (2) Words with orthographical changes (spelling changes).

Making a Derivational Tree Diagram is straightforward (partially because we're simplifying the morphology a bit), but there are three important rules to follow as you teach your students how to manipulate morphemes and observe the formation of words.

A couple of years ago, a guest presenter asked a group of my freshmen if they knew how to do multiplication in a spreadsheet.

One student raised his hand and said, “Sure, you use the little star, right?” The presenter broke into laughter and replied, “The little star! That is too cute! I believe you’re thinking of the asterisk symbol, young man.” With the rest of the class tittering, the student looked sheepishly back at his keyboard as the presenter continued lecturing on the basics of Excel.

With about five minutes left in the period, the presenter ran out of material and looked to me for a little help to fill the last moments. “Mr. Hoyt, are there any announcements or anything before we finish?”

I shouted, “Sure!” as I hopped up, made a straight path to the front of the room, and wrote the word “ASTERISK” in large letters on the marker-board. To be honest, I couldn’t have planned this any better myself.

It’s the bracelets that catch most people’s attention, but they were really just an afterthought.

A few years ago, I bought three or four hundred wristbands of various colors on an impulse Internet purchase. I had decided to run the vocabulary instruction in my classroom like a karate dojo, and a dojo requires belts.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I had come to the realization that my students urgently needed to develop and sharpen their metalinguistic skills and that the current vocabulary instruction paradigm wasn’t going to be enough to help them. After I found research and best practices to drive an effective intervention, I started developing a curriculum around morphology instead of vocabulary. One of the most important decisions I made, however, was  to design the curriculum to work like a dojo. I gave myself a black belt (I'm the giant hand with the wedding ring on in the picture), had my students take the oath of the dojo, and started them all off as white belts.

Why a dojo? Well, the dojo theme is fun, but it’s more than just a gimmick. Structuring a part of my curriculum on a belt system allowed me to:

1. Provide constant remediation and differentiation
2. Develop students' metalinguistic skills through specific, targeted practice
3. Distract students from the fact that their paradigm for understanding and approaching words is being turned inside-out.

Here’s a quick and easy way to combine reading comprehension with the development of morphological skills (and the ability to manipulate morphemes) called The Neologism Bring It. The basic idea is a simple twist on a reading check, but this method allows students to exercise higher-order thinking skills while they demonstrate that they've completed the reading and can recall it. Plus it's more fun.

Here’s what I do: At the beginning of class, I post a few root words on the marker-board or through the projector. I choose roots that can be related to something from the previous night's reading. To start the day, I ask the students to use these roots create a brand new word, completely of their own creation, and to use that new word in a sentence to describe something (anything!) that happened in the reading.

If I’ve chosen the roots well, generating neologisms should naturally lead the students into the important parts of the reading. The example below is from a reading on Their Eyes Were Watching God where Janie, the main character, speaks up for herself:

In order for this to work, however, you'll first need to introduce your students to neologisms and let them experience what it's like to make up their own words. Someone can probably improve on this, but I've got a pretty simple way of introducing the idea of neologisms, and it seems to work well.

In an earlier post, I suggested keeping the focus of morphological study on critical thinking, rather than on the memorization of lists. Instead of trying to turn kids into human dictionaries, we can provide them with a chance to develop strategies that will change the way they think about words.

This is one of the many reasons why we call my classroom a "dojo." In a karate dojo, you receive training, practice, and instruction, but the implications of the word "dojo" go deeper. The term "dojo" - "the place of the way" - implies a way of thinking, acting, and believing. For my students and me, that "way" comes in the three simple steps of something that we call a "Word Ninja."

At the beginning of the new academic year, we teachers reflect on how we can improve our courses and instruction for the upcoming year. As I addressed in my introductory post, morphology can be a tremendous tool for helping students improve their vocabulary, reading fluency, writing, and critical thinking. Even if you’re completely sold on the idea, however, you might not know where to start.

Here are three simple and important keys to using morphology in your own classroom.

To finish off these introductory posts, here is a brief background on this blog's raison d’etre, which might resonate with your own experience.

Research shows that by the time children reach the age of three, their patterns of linguistic communication and vocabulary growth are clearly established.  As baffling as it may seem, by the time children are four years old, a child growing up in a professional household (where both parents hold professional degrees) will have about 45 million words of “language experience,” while a child growing up in a welfare household will have only about 13 million words.  That is an astonishing and devastating gap of thirty million words by the age of four, all before most children enter a classroom (Hart & Risley, 1995).

If you watched the Scripps National Spelling Bee a couple of weeks ago on ESPN, then you might have found yourself wondering how an eighth grade girl from Philadelphia could possibly know how to spell the word “yttriferous” correctly. Where do these kids get their super-powers?  It's astonishing.  What might be even more mind-boggling is that I suspect that this young speller had never seen the word “yttriferous” before.  Why?  Because after some head-scratching and consternation, she asked the judges if the word was related to the element “yttrium.”

Why, yes, the judges responded.  Yes, it is.
And off she goes.