Literacy Now

Equipping adolescents to improve their vocabulary proficiency through greater morphological knowledge is not solely an exercise in isolated skills or memorization. Rather, it is a cohesive piece of the greater literacy puzzle that improves learners’ overall reading and writing abilities by strengthening both their vocabularies and their critical thinking skills.

Often young readers are exposed to roots, prefixes, and suffixes as part of early literacy development. However, in many instances—particularly for students in middle and high school—this area of study is shelved until it’s time for skill-and-drill test preparation, that is, standardized testing.

Although it may be important for adolescents to refresh their knowledge of affixes prior to these types of assessments, “one-and-done” cram sessions or other isolated examples are not effective for true morphological acquisition or vocabulary application.

Gaps within students’ vocabulary bases result in vocabulary equity gaps that only continue to widen without explicit, targeted attention. To avoid these gaps, adolescents need classroom opportunities to apply morphological study to authentic literacy tasks.

Practical advice for literacy educators

Literacy educators can provide both middle and high school students with opportunities for improved interactions with morphemes by ensuring that morphological awareness is an integrated part of classroom literacy culture. The key word here is integrated; morphological awareness is found to be most advantageous when it is included as part of balanced literacy curricula and initiatives.

By integrating morphology study within literacy curricula and in conjunction with other proven best practices in literacy, word study becomes a part of students’ literacy “tool kits,” as they individually strive to become more adept readers, writers, and thinkers. To equip adolescents with the skills they need to improve their morphological awareness, educators need to assess vocabulary from a morphological standpoint and authenticate students’ morphological knowledge using relevant literacy tasks.

Begin with a differentiated focus

Within the parameters of morphological study, operating with a differentiated focus is critical to the development of morphological awareness by English learners (ELs). Greek- and Latin-based languages share more cognates (words with similar etymology and pronunciation across languages) with English speakers. Therefore, ELs from Greek- and Latin-based languages have stronger baseline knowledge of morphemes than their native English–speaking peers.

Language teachers should be directly involved in morphology instruction using appropriate formative assessments that measure students’ prior morphological knowledge and their ability to interpret words from a morphological standpoint. Quick, informal, and ungraded tickets in the door or out the door can be used to briefly assess students’ understanding of morphemes. Students can be grouped on the basis of their strengths and weaknesses for more targeted instruction.

Implement strategic instruction

Scaffolding specific morphological word-attack strategies empowers students to learn how to analyze words with the assistance of an instructor or peer, eventually moving toward independent application. Approaching morphology study from a differentiated standpoint allows educators to cater instruction and coaching to the needs of individual students.

For example, students who have a basic understanding of morphemes to investigate basic word families with common roots, such as hydro- or spec would be a good starting point. For advanced students, manipulating familiar roots with various affixes allows students to revisit prior knowledge and build new connections and meaning. All students can keep a running personal glossary in their notes or journals of new vocabulary and new morphemes to which they may refer when reading and writing.

Provide authentic applications

Morphological knowledge, like other literacy skills, should be reaffirmed through authentic reading and writing tasks. Scaffolding text difficulty on the basis of the Lexile levels of texts and on learners’ reading levels directly influences the type of vocabulary with which students interact, and provides opportunities for them to apply morphological knowledge for the ultimate purpose of reading comprehension.

Integrating widespread texts across content areas can be synthesized through text-based writing, through which students apply newly acquired and morphologically rich vocabulary and bolster the critical thinking skills necessary for college and career readiness. For example, if a student encounters a science or social studies text—which are increasingly more common as literacy expands throughout curricula—he or she will need to use morphologically complex words from that text in his or her written reader’s response. If the student paraphrases a morphologically complex word, teachers can aptly assess whether the student understood morphemes and comprehended the text.

Moving forward

Improving morphological awareness among adolescents is best achieved using long-term integration alongside other literacy best practices. Educators who include targeted morphological study in the adolescent literacy classroom provide students with the opportunity to develop vocabulary acquisition skills that will prepare them for college, for careers, and for literacy interactions throughout their whole lives—this, indeed, is something to “root” on.

 Rebecca Hendrix is a third-year candidate in the University of West Georgia School Improvement Doctoral Program as well as a sixth-grade English language arts and reading teacher at a rural northwest Georgia middle school, where she has taught for nine years.

Robert Griffin, an ILA member since 2016, is an instructional leader who inspires culturally and linguistically diverse students to achieve and perform to their highest potential. He is also a part-time faculty member in the Department of Literacy and Special Education at the University of West Georgia.

This piece originally appeared in the November/December 2017 issue of Literacy Today, ILA's member magazine. 

As U.S. schools prepare to go on Thanksgiving break this week, it can be difficult to keep students engaged and learning amidst the excitement. The days leading up to break present a perfect opportunity to think about values such as gratitude, charity, friendship, and community. Below are a few ways to celebrate the holiday while improving literacy skills!

• Have students make an “I Am Thankful for…” book, where they write and illustrate what they are most thankful for. This encourages students to demonstrate gratitude while also strengthening their reading and writing skills. 
• Create your own Feed the Turkey game to help tone reading skills. Using an interactive game keeps students interested and constantly learning throughout.
• Construct felt depictions of traditional Thanksgiving characters, such as turkeys and vegetables. These can be used to retell fun Thanksgiving stories or to invent your own!
• See how many different words your child can build by rearranging the letters in Thanksgiving-themed words, such as “thankful,” “turkey,” and “pilgrim.”
• Play the Gobble Gobble Game. This is a fun, competitive way to practice the alphabet.
• Help students create Thanksgiving dinner menus. This will give them a chance to show off their writing skills to dinner guests!
• Challenge students to The New York Times’ Thanksgiving-themed crossword puzzle.
• Learn about the language and culture of the Wampanoag tribe.

For more ideas, check out our previous Thanksgiving-themed blog posts.

Samantha Stinchcomb is an intern at the International Literacy Association.           

2015–2016 was the most challenging year of Julie Stover’s career.

Pennsylvania had just rolled out the overhauled PA Core Standards and a new, more rigorous Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) that contained critical thinking and open-ended questions as well as more nonfiction reading. PSSA scores weigh heavily on School Performance Profile—the “report card” used to evaluate students, teachers, and students. Low test scores set up schools for possible state intervention.

“Being teachers, we already pressure ourselves. We hope to have every child reach his or her potential. But we felt a new and different push to raise ‘rigor’ and move full speed ahead. We saw more test practice, data walls, and higher teacher accountability,” says Stover, a reading specialist at East York Elementary.

When the scores came back, the teachers at East York Elementary breathed a sigh of relief. They hadn’t just done well, they had performed in the top 5% of Title I schools in the state.

Their celebration was short lived.

“Some of us gave a weak cheer. Then we began to wonder. We were successful, but at what cost?” says Stover. “How could we justify the cost of the accomplishment when students were excited to stop learning? The children couldn’t wait to get away from books. We wanted them running toward them.”

Data talk

On the basis of its test results, East York Elementary was identified as a High Progress School, recognizing its progress in closing achievement gaps in PSSA scores among all students and historically underperforming students. Under this designation, schools are eligible and encouraged to apply for Innovation Grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, which must be used to implement new learning structures and processes that support individual needs.

Stover was responsible for managing the application process, which required her to substantiate PSSA data and to provide a detailed plan of how East York Elementary would use the grant money, if successfully awarded.

As she scoured the school’s PSSA data, she noticed that the fifth grade had shown the most improvement from the previous year. Aside from their age, the only common denominator among these students was their shared participation in the Notice and Note close-reading strategies. Authored by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst, Notice and Note provides students with six “signposts” that signal readers to pause and reflect at “aha moments,” and other significant moments in the text. The tool kit also includes anchor questions to help facilitate discussion.

Wendy Ross, a fifth-grade teacher, says she introduced the strategy to give students a stronger sense of ownership over their reading routine.

“I think I was frustrated; my students didn’t seem to be enjoying reading. I felt like they didn’t have any power, not just in choice but in how they approached the text,” says Ross. “This strategy passed that power back to them—now, they’re in charge of finding meaning in their reading.”

After observing Ross’s success, Stover and writing teacher Amy Mason helped her deliver the Notice and Note strategies to the rest of the fifth-grade class. They too noticed improvements—not only in the students’ comprehension, but also in their attitude towards reading.

“It went beyond the quantifiable data. Kids were talking, the depth of their conversations was greater, and their writing was starting to tell more—there was detail and evidence,” says Stover.

Stover proposed that, if awarded an innovation grant, East York Elementary would use the funds to implement Notice and Note strategies throughout the school. Everyone was on board.

“We saw this small pocket of success in one classroom. We wanted to spread that success through the rest of the school,” says Denise Fuhrman, principal at East York Elementary.

Boosting staff morale

Of the 90 Innovation Grant applications, only 20 were funded. East York Elementary received one of the highest overall ratings and a grant.

Stover’s first step was to restore staff morale. After a year of rigorous exam preparation, she feared burnout for students and teachers alike.

Part of the problem, she knew, was the school’s outdated library. The staff sifted through Goodreads recommendations and ILA Choices selections to refresh their selection with a diverse range of titles that were highly engaging but also would enhance the Notice and Note reading routine.

“It brought the joy of reading back into teaching and revitalized the staff,” says Fuhrman.

Stover established weekly literacy team meetings where staff held book studies and discussions using the Notice and Note tool kit and designed posters, anchor charts, and bookmarks displaying signpost questions.

The grant even provided for a training session hosted by authors Beers and Probst. Afterward, the teachers delivered mock lessons for the authors to troubleshoot.

“This gave them the confidence and the physical support to say ‘We can actually do this,’” says Stover.

A newfound love of reading

Though the district has yet to receive its PSSA scores, Stover is confident that they will mirror the performance she sees in the classroom. She says the students have become more incisive thinkers, articulate speakers, and effective writers.

“It teaches them to respectfully discuss things with one another. They may not agree with each other, but now, they can go back and look at the evidence and prove their point with facts,” says Stover.

Mason noticed that students are more willing to share their ideas.

“They have a voice and they feel confident in sharing what they found,” says Mason.

Above all, the teachers were thrilled to see students’ newfound excitement towards reading. In an end-of-the-year survey, more than 80% of students said they gained a joy of reading.

“When Common Core first came about, we all felt overwhelmed. We felt like we were plodding along. We’re no longer plodding along—we’re dancing through books,” says Ross.

Alina O’Donnell is the editor of ILA’s blog, Literacy Daily.

This piece originally appeared in the November/December 2017 issue of Literacy Today, ILA's member magazine.

We find struggling readers everywhere. We see them in all class sizes, subjects, and grade levels. They work with classroom teachers, literacy coaches, and one-on-one interventionists. They attend colleges, trade schools, and adult education classes. Despite their different backgrounds, many struggling readers have the same identifiable skills deficits. Classroom teachers, special educators, and other interventionists may work with the same students, depending on the setting.

Struggling readers and writers will gain the most from their learning program if all literacy professionals on their team work together. Communication, reinforcement, and affirmation are important behaviors that can make small steps more meaningful to everyone invested in students’ success. What follows is a list of some important items to be aware of, regardless of where a student is placed in his or her educational setting.

Guidelines for effective interventions

• Language is complex. Reading and spelling disorders can take a long time to overcome and must be addressed through strong teaching, practice, and reinforcement. It is most advantageous to teach decoding and encoding skills concurrently.
• When different programs, books, or software are used in different settings by different teachers, with no connection made to each other’s instruction, students will have trouble processing the material.
• Too much emphasis on sight reading, without practice in syllable types, blending sounds, and multisensory learning for multisyllabic words, may lead students to rely on memory rather than develop the skills needed to progress.
• Memorizing spelling rather than learning to spell by sound and syllable type can also be counterproductive—students may commit too much to memory and be left without the foundational skills to advance. When introducing spelling rule exceptions, struggling readers need a slow, systematic introduction.

Reminders for teaching reading and decoding, spelling, and encoding

• Letters have both names and sounds; during the early stages of literacy, students need a solid foundation on sounds.
• If students have difficulty decoding or sounding out at the earliest level, they may need more practice in blending sounds or identifying syllable types.
• If students have trouble sounding out words to spell, they may need more instruction in segmenting sounds and working with syllable types.

Considerations for comprehension

Strategies such as visualization and metacognitive awareness are very helpful and commonly used in classrooms. However, it is important that comprehension skills be taught not only through strengthening/accommodating students’ listening skills and having them demonstrate comprehension mastery through other modalities but also by incorporating comprehension skills with decodable text based on their progression. Doing so will help get students with reading disabilities back on the page and build their relationship with print. 

Jeanne H. Smith is a literacy specialist at Community High School of Vermont and a correctional educator with St. Albans Probation and Parole.

I teach in a school system that’s home to a wide socioeconomic disparity. The median household income is $145,083, and approximately 20% of the township’s more than 22,000 residents work in finance and real estate. However, those numbers hide the 6.5% of the population who lives below the poverty line—a significant minority of working-class immigrants for whom English is not their first language.

This disparity is evident at our school’s annual Halloween assembly, where parents are invited to attend grade-level skit performances, followed by a classroom party. One year, I saw five parents working hard in my classroom to create a festive party, yet outside the classroom door lingered four more immigrant parents who were reluctant to enter. I wanted all my families to feel welcomed and connected, but I didn’t know how.

A solution crystallized when I heard professor David Schwarzer of Montclair State University speak on culture, language, and curricular choices at the ILA 2015 Conference & Exhibits, in St. Louis, MO. I left with a plan to make all families feel welcomed.

Introducing Family Friday

Each year, as students step into a new grade and classroom, teachers should ask, “What stories do our students carry? How can we evoke them?”

In my third-grade classroom, these questions led to the creation of Family Friday.

It can feel overwhelming for teachers to add anything new to the schedule. In my classroom, however, a feasible solution was to reserve just 15 minutes each week to open our doors to honor our students’ families, creating the opportunity for personal storytelling and conversation. Through our new Family Friday tradition, students explore cultural experiences perhaps vastly different from their own.

Family Friday comes from the belief that all students should be given the opportunity to share their own experiences and listen to those of others. The goal in our classroom is to involve families and help students learn about other cultures, traditions, and global experiences. There is no specific format; family members can partner with their children, bring a translator, or ask the teacher to arrange for a translator. They can share photographs, slides, or video of a special place or festival; present cultural symbols and artifacts; read a bilingual book; or tell a story.

Encouraging participation 

I teamed up with our school’s bilingual parent liaison to reach out to and encourage our families to participate in Family Friday. Our liaison was extremely successful by following these simple steps:

• Make personal contact with each family
• Provide each family with suggestions on what to bring
• Work alongside each family, as needed, to translate any aspect of the presentation
• Offer encouragement and emotional support
• Translate all letters sent home

Every family she contacted visited our classroom. The best part was watching my students’ faces light up when their parents and siblings were the teachers and storytellers.

Having meaningful conversations

Students were delighted to see their classmate’s father translate their names into Mandarin and hear an explanation of their names’ meanings. They heard the story of a student’s family’s struggle to escape from war-torn Honduras, watched a video of a classmate splashing in his favorite watering hole when visiting his grandparents in Mexico, and laughed at the concept of Armenian egg jousting.

During each Family Friday gathering, we broke into small groups to allow students to ask questions and share ideas. Some jotted ideas into their notebooks while others asked thoughtful questions about the immigrant experience, such as “What was it like to come to a new and strange country? How did you adapt?” 

Building a community

Through Family Friday, we are building a culture of kindness, empathy, and respect. As students share their treasured stories to a respectful audience, they feel valued.

At the end of year, we gathered highlights from each family’s presentation. As a class project, students in the classroom or at home created three slides to represent their family’s contribution. We combined them into a single slideshow with a student-composed soundtrack made with GarageBand.

We held a celebration where we invited all our families to celebrate “Who We Are.” I looked around my room to see people from Armenia, Bangladesh, Belize, Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Romania, and the United States. Each student’s story represented a patch on a quilt, stitched together by our classroom community.

Staci Kaplan, an ILA member since 2014, is a literacy coach for Summit Public Schools in New Jersey.


This piece originally appeared in the November/December 2017 issue of Literacy Today, ILA's member magazine.