Strand 2/Morphology - Part 1: Nonsense and Made-Up Words, Focusing on Nouns

You could start with Lesson 1, the nonsense sentence activity from Strand 1, where the goal is to understand our unconscious knowledge of parts of speech and our use of morphology and syntax in accessing that knowledge. We can figure out a lot about words, categories, and meanings by using morphology, syntax, and even phonology. (The phonology focus will be unique to this strand. We’ll examine, for example, some sound changes and correspondences that can shed light on relationships between words of Latin origin and those of Anglo-Saxon origin.) There’s a great version of this lesson, called “Morphology Games: What making up words reveals,” posted by Christina Galeano on Teachling here.


We can also see how we use morphological knowledge by looking at made-up but “real” words, words you likely have never heard before: unsluglike. How do you know what that means? Because you know the meanings of the parts, the morphemes. What does un- mean? What does the suffix -like mean? The strategy here and in figuring out morpheme meaning in general will be to think of other words that also have that same piece. So, words like unhappy, uninteresting or childlike. (Un- is actually trickier than most morphemes because there are two uns with different meanings that attach to different parts of speech – the un- of unhappy which means ‘not’ and attaches to adjectives, and the un- of untie that means ‘reverse the action’ and attaches to verbs. So that could be a separate lesson or you could choose a word that’s easier to analyze than unsluglike.)

Strand 2/Morphology Syllabus

I think that focusing on lexical categories (parts of speech) for this morphology/vocabulary strand is a good way to organize it. So we can begin with nouns, move on to verbs, and then clauses, with the other pieces coming along (or not) along the way, but the thread connecting the lessons will be vocabulary development and word analysis rather than applications to writing.

We’ll be exploring words and their pieces, and how breaking down words into their meaningful parts can help with all sorts of things – reading, comprehension, vocabulary development, critical thinking.

Deidre and I talked the other day about how so many of the word roots and pieces that one might choose to investigate (say lists of Latin and Greek roots) come up in context and you can then explore them on the spot (or decide you’d like to; no one is supposed to know the meanings of all of these pieces just off the top of your head). And that such a spontaneous approach is much preferred to, say, having a list of words and roots to cover every week. However, we also think it might be useful to have some master list that you (and your students?) can check off as you do encounter them. So I’ll think about that.

I think the so-called syllabus for the morphology strand will be much more loosey-goosey than the grammar strand. And I’ll be responding to what’s happening in the classrooms of Deidre, Dave, and anyone else out there who ends up following along. But the following few Strand 2 Morphology posts have some ideas to get us started.