Integrated Morphological Awareness Integration as a Tool for Improving Literacy
from UC website
by Cecilia Kirk and Gail Gillon

'Thus as children encounter longer, more complex words, morphological awareness becomes critical for developing good literacy skills.' (Carlisle 1993)

Goal of the study was to evaluate effectiveness of an intervention programme that aimed to improve reading and spelling in children with specific spelling difficulties by teaching them to coordinate morphological awareness with other types of linguistic awareness; phonological awareness, orthographic awareness (ability to translate written into spoken) eg hopping, hoping and syntactic awareness (meaning of new words)

Study was of 16 chn 8.07-11.01 with specific spelling difficulties

METHOD
needed poor spellers of normal intelligence, so did tests to check.

Focus - mastering a few frequently occurring morphological patterns instead of learning to read and spell particular words.

Sorting words to find similarities and patterns eg. 'those with a short vowel contain an extra consonant eg, huge, hedge .... ed sounds /t/  /d/  /ed/
Adding a suffix: when adding a suffix to a word with a short vowel you need to double to last letter
eg mop - mopping

A Typical Session

• identifying long & short vowels with pictures
• sorting morphologically simple words
• prompted spelling with morphologically simple words
• sorting morphologically complex words
• prompted spelling with morphologically complex words

'I'd like you to spell the word 'trick'. I'll use the word 'trick' in a sentence .... Now before you write anything down tell me if the vowel sound is short or long. That's right, it's short. So if it's short how do we spell the 'k' sound? That's right 'ck' because short vowels are greedy and like an extra consonant. Now write the word 'trick''

RESULTS:

the group showed better reading and spelling performance that the control group on both experimental and standardised measures of testing and it was maintained when tested 6 months later.

Morphological awareness if the ability to analysis words into their component morphemes eg unimportant

With weekly spelling lists consider the linguitic properties of the words.

I have not come across the word morphological. It would appear that pre-teaching of long and short vowels would be essential before starting this programme. It sounds like a good idea.

RTLit Meeting - 5/11/15

This meeting was a Chch East School for SENCOs. We meet the RTLits for our area; Anna-Marie, Pene (Breens) and Liz.

The RTLit service focus on students 2 years or more below their age. There is 1 RTLit for every 7 RTLBs. Their focus is reading/writing/oral language.

They provide advice, modeling and guidance. They sometimes might provide direct instruction to individuals or groups.

They mentioned Gail Gillon: rhyme - syllable - onset&rime - phoneme

They also named a few very good resources -

7+ www.sharpreading.com (short-term reading intervention programme for students who are reading at least at the average age of 7 and sho are behind the National Standards.

Storytelling Schools  www.storytellingschools.com  3 texts storytelling, storytelling myths and fables and storytelling in science. Great for getting oral languague of writing going before students write.

Progress in Learning  www.progressinlearning.co.nz/about.html

Trugs - Phonics game which is apparently great fun. would be great to have in classrooms.

Clicker Sentences

Peter & The Black Cat - assessment for oral language; it is not a norm-referenced text but gives a descriptive profile of the student. Also an app but is $30 and takes a while to analyse.

ESOL Cluster Meeting Term 4

This cluster meeting was at Clearview Primary in Rolleston.

The HotSpot was done by Westburn School who had been doing an Inquiry into English Language Learners in Innovative/Modern Learning Environments. The important thing I got out of her talk was  that it is best to keep withdrawing the students as it is important for their emotional well being.