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Morphological Awareness

Vocabulary is the term for the words of a language and morphology is the term for the study of the parts of words. Students’ vocabularies expand through the study of word parts, specifically root or base words (connect), affixes (reconnect, connection, inflectional morphemes (e.g., connects, connecting, connected).

The study of word parts increases awareness of the links between words, including the origins of words in other languages. Cognate means to have “the same ancestry.” Many English words are close cognates to German words (e.g., apple/Apfel). Other English words are easily traced to French words (e.g., communicate/communiquer). French and Spanish both originated from Latin which means that cognates also exist between English and Spanish words (e.g., communicate/comunicar).

TextProject provides the following valuable resources on morphology, including English-Spanish cognates.

Featured Content

E4: Exceptional Expressions for Everyday Events

New edition! Revised, updated and polished! E4 is a series of 32 flexible vocabulary development lessons each focusing on an everyday concept and brainstorming other words that describe the concept.

E4 explores the meaning of a word, as well as its morphology.

Frankly Freddy Posts

High-Leverage Action #2

In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common origin.

This Frankly Freddy entry looks at the history of English language and its cognates in Romance based languages, such as Spanish.

Word Findings #1

As students move through the grades, morphological awareness increasingly predicts students’ reading.

This Frankly Freddy entry explains the importance of morphological awareness and the role it can play in learning vocabulary.

Research Articles from the Library section

Morphological Knowledge and Learning to Read in English

Hiebert, E.H., & Bravo, M., (2010). Morphological knowledge and learning to read in English. In D. Wyse, R. Andrews, & J. Hoffman (Eds.), International Handbook of English, Language and Literacy Teaching (pp. 87-97). Oxford, UK: Routledge.

An analysis of English-Spanish cognates as a source of general academic language

Lubliner, S., & Hiebert, E.H. (2011). An analysis of English-Spanish cognates as a source of general academic language. Bilingual Research Journal. 34(1), 76-93.

Resources from the Library section

Word Zones™ for 5,586 Most Frequent Words

This list of 5,586 most frequent words is comprised of the 1000 most frequent words and their morphological family members.

Spanish-English Cognates

This TextProject resource lists 25 common Spanish words and their English counterparts.

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