M O R P H O L O GI C A L S T R AT E GI E S

TRAINING: THE EFFECTIVENESS AND

FEASIBILITY OF MORPHOLOGICAL
S T R AT E GI E S T R A I N I N G F O R S T U D E N T S
OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
WITH AND WITHOUT SPELLING
D I F F IC U LTIES

B Y M I F TA H I K M A L ( P B I - 3 A )
1703046035
Until recently, spelling, compared to reading and oral skills,
was a rather neglected area of psycholinguistic research. That
was probably because spelling had been regarded as a school
subject or as a ‘pure’ conventional aspect of written language
rather than an area for scientific investigation (Perfetti, 1997).
• ‘orthographic knowledge’, that is the ability to understand orthography and its
constraints (e.g., the unacceptable letter sequences), is instrumental in spelling
development (Brown & Ellis, 1994; Caravolas, Hulme, & Snowling, 2001;
Snowling & Hulme, 1991;Treiman, 1993).
• However, English orthography is not straightforward phonemic transcription of
speech (Ehri, 1989). English orthography is considered as ‘opaque’ or ‘deep’
during the reading and spelling process, as grapheme-phoneme relationships
contain many inconsistencies and irregularities.
• morphological awareness “focuses on children’s conscious awareness of the
morphemic structure of words and their ability to reflect on and manipulate
that structure”
• In other words, morphological awareness refers to the ability to explicitly
understand the smallest meaningful components of the words (morphemes).
• In a broader sense, morphological awareness includes the manipulation of
morphemes, which are the smallest units of meaning and can be either free or
bound.
• Free morphemes can be individual words
=> (e.g. eye, wife, believe).
• Bound morphemes cannot stand alone as words but they have to be
combined with other morphemes in order to make sense or to
modify the meaning of a word. Bound morphemes can be either;
• =>prefixes (e.g. de-, ex-, in-, intra-, sub-, un-),
or
• =>suffixes (-er, - or, -tion, -ness, -y, -ful, -able, -ly).
A study, conducted with Greek
children, found that there is a
strong and specific connection
between children’s morphological
awareness and their
morphological spellings (Bryant,
Nunes, & Aidinis, 1999).

Comparison studies drew attention to

the differences in morphological
awareness and spelling accuracy
between children with learning
disabilities (dyslexia) and without
learning disabilities.
THE IMPLEMENTATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL STRATEGIES
TRAINING
23 students the treatment the The control group :25
Morphological Processing students (regular English
Spelling Approach (MPSA) group spelling program)

45
min.
Each session included a complete spelling activity performed in
five basic steps, each focusing on a certain subprocess with a
specific objective;
• first, pre-dictation step, the teaching emphasis was on
morphological awareness training.
• the second step, the main step of teacher dictation, was on
highlighting morpho-semantics and morpho-orthographic relations.
• the third step was stimulating the students to reflect on the
spelling patterns corresponding to analyzed morphemes.
• The fourth step aimed at providing students with the
opportunity for self correction, with the teacher paying special
attention to the students with spelling difficulties.
• the final step, the students were encouraged to verbalize
metamorphological strategies explicitly, to report on the specific
difficulties they encountered during the whole procedure and
to evaluate themselves in a rather enjoyable environment
releasing them from ‘failure fear’.
 MEANS, STANDARD DEVIATIONS, AND MIXED
SUMMARIES FOR PRE-AND POST TEST SPELLING
VARIABLES
 MEANS, STANDARD DEVIATIONS, AND MIXED
SUMMARIES FOR PRE-AND POST TEST SPELLING
VARIABLES
SELF CORRECTING INDEX
MEANS OF OBSERVED TEACHER’S BEHAVIOUR AND
STUDENTS PARTICIPATION
STUDENTS’ SATISFACTION
CATEGORIES OF THE STUDENTS’ RESPONSES TO OPEN -
ENDED QUESTION RELATED TO THE EFFECT OF
THE MPSA
 CONCLUSION
• effectiveness study indicated that the students of the treatment class scored significantly
better than the control group.
• The questionnaire data revealed that the students were pleased with the MPSA project.
• In the teacher interviews, it was shown that the teachers were eager to incorporate such
a project in the English language upper primary classroom, since it seemed to be
workable.
So, the three studies suggested that intervention was successful in improving spelling
performance. Since special attention should be given to the importance of morphological
strategies for the spelling development of poor and typical EFL students, the MPSA project
could be implemented simultaneously in several primary school classrooms throughout a
longer period of time. Thus, its effectiveness could be examined across different classrooms
in order to depict a broader and more complete picture in the future.
Thank you…