Blast from the Past: Is Morphology Training Better Than Phonics Instruction?

Tara-
I think the research encourages two things here: (1) Earlier attention to morphology and (2) Greater emphasis on flexibility and conditionality in phonics training (kids need to think about alternative possibilities).

tim

Tension in the field!
This week I listened to a webinar with Robert Pondiscio bc he tweeted about older kids that bump into a decoding threshold.
As remediators we see this constantly.
To my astoundment, the PhD on the show said when you see “cat” in the word education.
Very troubling
Ed-u-ca-tion
No cat.
I remember Mark Seidenberg saying there are even more exceptions in morphemes than there are in Phonics.

The question that this raises is that given how unstable many of the syllable divisions are, is it worth the time spent teaching these patterns? When I say unstable, I mean even educators can’t agree on how to break some words up into syllables as these are based more on how words are pronounced than their meaning. It seems logical, that after students can decode and encode common single syllable words through phonics instruction, then teaching morphology and etymology could the next step. Do you think we have enough evidence that syllable teaching is the way to go?

Shabari--

I do think there is enough research evidence to suggest the value of a limited amount of syllable instruction as long as it is sufficiently conditional (providing alternative possibilities). This link provides that evidence:
https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/on-eating-elephants-and-teaching-syllabication-2

tim

Thank you so much for addressing this. It is vital to do both. If you want to see how one can accomplish this with very young, preschool aged children, who have not yet begun to read please investigate the wrok of Rebecca Loveless. She does some amazing work. One simple game "In The Family" asks kids to notice if a word can belong with the others. They do not even have to be able to read at all. The teacher can actually do the reading and name the letters. So for example the following words would be in a bag; rain, raincoat, raining, rains, rainy, ranier, raniest, rained, rainbow, grain, ran. The child pulls out one word which the teacher (or child if they are able) spells and reads. You can also start with the word rain already laid out establishing that as the base. As each word is pulled from the bag it is used in a sentence, spelled, and placed with the base or not. There is much valuable discussion as it is established that it must have the same base (rain) to be in the designated "family" area. The child is learning the letters as they are repeated and the conversation about what is carrying the meaning is invaluable. Think about the discussions surrounding rainiest and most especially grain and ran! I have played this game with children and it really sparks their interest. Pronunciation discussions come up easily; think about the conversation regarding the letter O that would occur with do, don't and does. It is great work that points kids in the right direction rather than misrepresenting our orthographic system as so may phonics programs do!

Miriam P. Trehearne
Thanks again Tim for addressing this
Important issue. it also came up this week at The World Literacy Conference in Oxford, in my session. Again you clarify what the research truly says while keeping in mind the quantity of research in this area focussing on the early years. The research does NOT indicate an either or approach!

Thank you for this post Tim.

I understand why you present it as “eating crow,” but I would argue that changing our minds publicly based on new evidence, or a new analysis of evidence, should be the stuff of celebration in any scientific community. A post like this from a prominent scientist sharing a shift from previous positions provides many with a renewed openness to consider their own thinking. While you signal shifting more to my thinking, it will be the differences we still have that will be most interesting to discuss.

I wanted to address two points about your previous post for your readers.

Not Before But Together

First, I wanted to address the framing of title. You do not make this claim yourself, but people frequently frame Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) as if it claims morphology instruction should happen “before” or “instead” of phonics. This is simply not the case.

SWI seeks to teach how the writing system works from the beginning. That is only possible if we explicitly teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences and influences from morphology and etymology that make sense of those correspondences from the beginning. One can disagree with that approach, but I wanted to make sure your readers recognize that I know of nobody working with SWI who recommends morphological instruction before or instead of teaching about grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

Anyone interested can see this document, “Guiding Principles, Concepts & Practices of Structured Word Inquiry (SWI)” I put recently in part to address this common mistaken view of SWI: https://tinyurl.com/y58atmxb

The Question of Chunking of “action”

Secondly I think I may be able to address your questions about dividing the word “action” into syllables (ac / tion) vs morphemes (act + ion) more effectively than I could back when you published in 2017.

Maryanne Wolf (2018) says that our attention systems are “biological spotlights.” I find this idea that you can’t make any mental connections (learn) where you do not attend helpful on this point.

In the earlier post, you wrote:

“For example, one colleague pointed out that in some phonics programs, kids are taught to divide the syllables of “action” in the following manner: ac/tion. He argued that this was a bad choice because it obscures that the root word is “act.” That’s correct linguistically, but does it matter when you’re 7?”

Of course attending to the and and and linking those spellings to to the pronunciation /æk/ and /??n/ can help many recognize the word without ever thinking about the spelling of the word “act.”

But the danger I see is not really about how a learner looks at a specific word. Instead, my fear is the effect of instruction that results in a schema that has learners default to “chunking” words into syllables when trying to recognize a word during reading, or spell them when writing.

In English, syllabic structures are not constrained my morphology. So the habit of mind for thinking in “syllabic chunks” will regularly favour attention to non-meaning bearing units at the expense of attending to spelling-meaning correspondences in morphemes.

My own anecdotal experience of shifting this default within a week of seeing my first matrix in 2001 from Real Spelling may be illustrative. (See current on-line version of Real Spelling here: https://www.tbox2.com/)

For most of my teaching career I put up a “Question Wall of Fame” sign in a section of my classroom from the first day of class. It was way to tell kids I was encouraging them I was not just looking for "answers" but excellent "questions" as well. I worked to make "questioning" a central driver learning in our class.

A week after I saw my first matrix at a Real Spelling presentation in 2001, I was sitting in my grade 4 classroom and that “Question Wall of Fame” poster grabbed my attention.

For the first time ever, I thought, “No way! Asking a question is going on a “quest” for understanding!” For 9 years I had been working to motivate my students to “question” their world. I could not believe that I had never noticed the “quest” before.

It turned out, I was not alone. A tiny minority of educators I work with have noticed the “quest” in “question” or that a “disease” is a system that is not “at ease.” before I draw their attention to these ideas with word sums or a matrix.

I can see no other explanation for this than the habit of mind of thinking in syllables“di/sease” or “ques/tion” directs our biological spotlights to leave those spelling-meaning correspondences of morphology in the dark. I am very curious if this frame plays a role for those labeled as "low comprehenders." These are people who have average or above decoding, but below average comprehension.

The other new data for me since your first post is the whole concept of the universal combinatorial nature of oral and written language.

I will address the link between that and the “action” question in a follow-up comment…

But many thanks for prompting this on-going discussion.

Pete

This comment follows on my previous one.

I wanted to highlight the role of "combinatoriality" in this question of "chunking" the word "action."

A couple of months ago, I posted a video (20 min) with my colleague Marie Foley who is an expert at illustrating complex orthographic concepts. We attempted to unpack this concept of the combinatorial structure of language, how it is realized in English, and how the matrix and word sum provide “combinatorial guard rails for literacy instruction. You can see that video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZl41tS9DA

Share’s (2025) article is quite astonishing in its scope and implications. But one of the articles he repeatedly pointed to highlighted another piece of the morphology and phonology puzzle that strikes me as having potentially profound implications. The Now-or-Never Bottleneck paper by Christiansen and Chater, 2016) makes the following statements may have important implications for understanding literacy learning that has not yet been part of the discussion:

“… the language system engages in eager processing when creating chunks. Chunks must be built right away, or memory for the input will be obliterated by interference from subsequent material.” (Christiansen & Chater, 2016, p. 9)

“The acoustic signal [phones] is first chunked into higher-level sound units at the phonological level. To avoid interference between local sound-based units, such as phonemes or syllables, these are further recoded as rapidly as possible into higher-level units such as morphemes or words.”

If I'm reading this correctly, according to combinatoriality, attending to oral morphology increases our capacity to “hold on” to phonology. This may help explain findings from morphological meta-analyses with the younger and less able gain the most from morphological instruction and Goodwin and Ahn’s (2010, 2013) findings that phonological outcomes saw the greatest benefit from morphological instruction.

I recently presented a 60 min talk “The Matrix Matters Because Language Is Combinatorial” for the 9th Annual Conference of the Dyslexia Training Institute that goes into much more detail about what combinatoriality is, why this structure is necessary to navigate the limits of cognitive processing and the fit with the matrix and word sums. They just made this talk from the conference public. I have not pointed to it yet elsewhere yet. Perhaps your readers may find it useful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-aSzJAtF4Y

The last 5 minutes hones in on the quotes above.

Apologies for the long responses.

Thanks for your work Tim.

From Pete’s first comment above: ‘SWI seeks to teach how the writing system works from the beginning. That is only possible if we explicitly teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences and influences from morphology and etymology that make sense of those correspondences from the beginning’.

I’m trying to consider that in relation to Miriam Giskin’s comment about the game based on the family of ‘rain’ words, as Pete himself drew my attention, in 2019, to an SWI video showing a similar activity using ‘rain’ as a base. He, like Miriam, commented on the fact that the children were not expected to read the words but that they were being introduced to letter-names. By my count, 15 letters feature in the words Miriam mentions – that’s a lot of letters for beginners, and it’s only letter-names, with no mention of grapheme-phoneme correspondences or their practical application in reading and spelling. To my way of thinking, therefore, no phonics is involved.

In his second comment above, Pete mentions ‘combinatoriality’, as propounded by David Share in his 2024 ‘blueprint’ article – great stuff indeed. The paragraphs quoted by Harriett from that article, however, suggest that Share might envisage beginners being introduced to combinatoriality at an ‘oversimplified’ letter-sound level as a first step and only then moving on to larger units. He does say that ‘morphemes such as the English plural -s suffix and the past tense -ed which each which each have multiple phoneme values depending on the previous morpheme is surely acquired near the outset of reading’, but those are very common and pretty straightforward – and ‘near the outset’ doesn’t mean ‘at the outset’.

Thank you for this thoughtful updated blog!
Teaching morphology starting in the first year of school is what I have advocated for through my PhD and subsequent research on the topic of spelling. Extensive data that I have gathered over the years show how early morphological instruction can be done and that it can be highly impactful. Specifically, I have lots of data to show that morphological skills can develop concurrently with phonics in the early years of school, if students are taught morphology. I have data that shows which morphological subskills appear easier and which seem to be harder. There is a lot of data that I have not published on this topic, but some of my published pieces related to this include:

Daffern, T. (2024). Developing spelling skills. In N.M Mackenzie., & J. Scull (Eds), Understanding and supporting young writers from birth to 8. (Chapter 6). Oxfordshire: Routledge. ISBN: 10.4324/9781315561301-7

Daffern, T. (2024). Teaching writing conventions. In E. Rata (Ed.), Research Handbook on Curriculum and Education (Vol. Part II Knowledge structures and the curriculum, pp. 228-244): Edward Elgar.

Daffern, T., Hogg., K., Callaway, N., Wild, H., & Kelly, S. (2024). Supporting schools to implement an evidence-based and effective approach to teaching spelling. Learning Difficulties Australia, 56(3), 31-38.

Daffern, T. (2022). Empowering teachers with an evidence-based spelling pedagogy. Practical Literacy: The Early and Primary Years, 27(2), 14-18.

Daffern, T., & Sassu, A. (2020). Building morphological foundations. Practical Literacy: The Early and Primary Years, 25(3), 35-37

Daffern, T., Mackenzie, N., & Hemmings, B. (2015). The development of a spelling assessment tool informed by Triple Word Form Theory. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 38(2), 72-82.

Daffern, T. (2021). Exploring Australian students’ spelling skills. Oxford Children’s Language Australia. Oxford University Press

Daffern, T. (2020). Assessment informed practices for teaching spelling in the early years: Early Action for Success (EAfS) Pathway. Report submitted to the NSW Department of Education

Also ... here are links to 2 videos involving 5-year old children, about 4 months into their first year of schooling (Foundation year):

- Foundations in Spelling 1: https://youtu.be/mic6O14ZI0w?si=piVwU60OZuLlvmte
- Foundations in Spelling 2 (a child reading a text that the students in the class co-wrote following the lessons shown in the previous video): https://youtu.be/mic6O14ZI0w?si=piVwU60OZuLlvmte

Plus: This is a bit of an old video now, but in it, I outline some information on the Components of Spelling Test for the Early Years (CoSTEY): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dtXNYkfJVg&list=UU5pvqoUDTNouQSHcPFOXS-w&index=31&t=25s
The CoSTEY has 3 component tests (phonology, orthography and morphology - aligned with Triple Word Form Theory). Australian norm-references are included for each component.

Also: here is a recorded version of a webinar where I outline the resources that I have developed to support teachers to teach the components of spelling, including morphology, from the first year of school. https://youtu.be/XkTx05q2wBs?si=vLYO0JCeRUNvd4Vi
For example, I talk about the CoSTEY Dashboard - it contains examples of scope and sequences where morphology is included and aligned with the phonological and orthographic components of spelling. Morphological activities are tailored based on the error analysis from the CoSTEY.

Feel free to get in touch with me to chat further if you wish. My best email is tessa@daff.net.au

Thanks again for your valuable insights.

Dr Tessa Daffern