Action Steps

1. Give students a daily notebook assignment in which they write out a grid like the one used in this module's Guided Practice exercise "Word Families," as illustrated below. In this way, students can build their own records of Noun/Verb changes, Noun/Adjective changes, and Adjective/Adverb changes associated with word roots such as PATH, ANN, DICT, etc., and thereby learn from morphographic representations of whole classes of interconnected words and meanings.

	Noun	Verb	Adjective	Adverb
	sym…..y	sym…..ize	sym…..etic	sym…..etically
	…..uity	…..ualize	…..ual	…..ually
	pre…..ion	pre…..	pre…..able	pre…..ably

2. The type of handout shown below is useful for homework practice for morphographic analysis and also serves as a handy, organized reference sheet for future study. Students can use the format to keep their own reference sheet for word study. They can indicate which words they know or don't know; they can analyze the words into morphographs, identifying prefixes, roots, and suffixes; and they can record the meanings of words. All vocabulary words in the sample list are taken from the text Word Roots ( Glazier, 1993).

Know/ Don't Know	Vocabulary Word	Morphographic Analysis/Meaning
	1. atheist	a=not /THE=God /-ist=person "someone who does not believe in God"
	2. amoral
	3. anomalous
	4. anemia
	5. anecdote
	6. anomaly
	7. anonymous
	8. apathy
	9. ambiguous
	10. ambivalent
	11. biannual
	12. centennial
	13. antagonism
	14. ambidextrous
	15. anonymous
	16. atypical
	17. anarchy
	18. superannuated
	19. antedates
	20. ambivalent

3. Spend part of each class day (only up to five minutes or so) pointing out common word roots that occur in the natural course of events in class. (See Paul, 1998.)

4. Be aware that even college-level deaf students may not have completely mastered the common inflectional suffixes. Ideally, students should regularly review one of the following suffixes in a meaningful context (see Gaustad, Kelly, Payne, & Lylak, in press).

	INFLECTIONAL SUFFIXES
	-s		noun plural
	-'s		noun possessive
	-s		verb present 3rd person singular
	-ing		verb present participle/gerund
	-ed		verb simple past tense
	-en		verb past perfect participle
	-er		comparative
	-est		superlative

 

5. At each opportunity, point out the visual regularity of morphemic changes in words and the meanings these common changes have within words. Regularly have students point them out to one another (Kelly, 1993, 1996).

6. In class, encourage students to discuss words and their etymologies (origins) in context at least once a week, so students can learn the discourse of word knowledge acquisition (see Davey & King, 1990).

7. Try to label "parts of speech" (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) for target words so students become familiar with the differences in meaning when words change from one part of speech to another. When time allows, ask students to provide sentence-length examples of these words and have them label the words appropriately.

8. Spend class time teaching students to break words into their immediate constituents and ask them to pay attention to the root or base of target words so that they can learn to recognize these roots in other words and in other contexts. It is useful to have students bring in examples from other situations, be it classwork or readings outside of class (Marschark & Harris, 1996).

9. Do not be afraid to analyze words in a regular, methodical way as an example for students to practice developing their own skills. Then follow up by getting students to share their own analyses.