Kieffer, M. J., & Lesaux, N. K. (2007). Breaking down words to build meaning: Morphology, vocabulary, and reading comprehension in the urban classroom. The Reading Teacher, 61(2), 134-144.
The generative power of knowledge of morphology has always struck me, and this article provides convincing evidence of that power for fourth and fifth grade urban students (many of them ELL's).
I find that the ability to break words into "chunks," both meaning chunks (morphemes) and sound chunks, is a key to developing skill in decoding, especially as children get older and start to encounter more and more multi-syllable words. At that point, the combination of "sounding out" words and using context is no longer completely adequate.
The authors here describe a study where knowledge of morphology (defined as the ability to pull a root word out of a larger word) was strongly related to reading comprehension. They recommend explicit instruction in morphology, and provide some helpful guidelines describing what effective morphology instruction might look like.
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