the Catholic Educator

Morphology is the study of morphemes, which are units of meaning. For example, the letter unit “tri” is not a word, yet it has meaning. It signifies three. When connected to one or more morphemes in a word, those morphemes give shape to the word meaning. In the word Triune, we can identify not only the Latin prefix (morpheme) “tri,” but we also see the ending “une” and its similarity to the Latin “uni” – meaning one. We would suspect, if we did not know its meaning, that Triune had something to do with three and one. In fact, its most basic definition is three in one. You have probably had this experience of getting the gist of a word by examining its morphology. It is an important skill to develop in children, but seems to have lost its appeal in modern education. Not only is the study of morphology important for the development of vocabulary, it is also important in the development of spelling. In his creative blog The Morphology Dojo, Andrew Hoyt offers some classroom ideas for a morphological approach to teaching vocabulary.