How Morphological and Etymological Families Work

This film offers an understanding of how the interrelationship of morphology and etymology inform the spellings and meanings of the words we read every day.
Educators teaching with "Structured Word Inquiry" (SWI) (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) explicitly teach how English spelling works to represent the interrelation of morphology, etymology and phonology of words. Analyzing word families with morphological matrices and word sums is central to that process. It turns out that you can't reliably analyze the morphology of words if you do not understand how it interrelates with etymology.
The last decade has seen major growth in terms of the literacy research focus on the importance of morphological instruction. I was lead author on the first meta-analysis on the effect of morphological instruction (Bowers, Kirby & Deacon, 2010). We found that younger and less able students gained the most from morphological instruction. All subsequent meta-analyses and reviews corroborated and expanded on those findings. Goodwin and Ahn (2010) found that phonological outcomes showed the greatest gains from morphological instruction, even outperforming effects on morphological outcomes.
For an accessible introduction to the research related to SWI see Bowers (2020) at this link: psyarxiv.com/a...
The increased interest in morphology instruction is important, but makes little reference to etymology. As this video shows, reliable morphological analysis of words requires understanding of etymology.
This video is a collaboration with Marie Foley who did all the animation. Marie came to study with me at the residential course I host on Wolfe Island, Ontario a number of years ago. She continued to study with me and many others working in SWI while tutoring her students. Explore her Facebook Group "Making Sense of English Using Scientific Inquiry" and you will find countless beautiful, short, animated descriptions of orthographic concepts of all kinds. Those films were created for her own tutoring with students. However, they are beloved by teachers working with SWI as her animations bring such clarity to key orthographic concepts teachers need to understand.
Seeing Marie’s work inspired me to ask if she would collaborate with me to build a different kind of orthographic film. Educators, not students would be the main target of this film. I wanted to apply her remarkable skills for representing orthographic concepts to a more complex but central feature of how our writing system works.
I could not be more pleased with the result. This is a film that people can revisit over and over and find something new each time. It is divided in 3 parts, like chapters in a book. Like a good book, the story Marie tells is best understood when studied in order. You have control over the pace of processing of information that works for you. We encourage you to be ready to pause the video to study a specific frame that catches your eye more carefully. You may need to “flip back” to an earlier part of the story to make sense of a given slide. I hope people find ways to watch the film together closely with a friend so you can pause and discuss the ideas as they come up. This is not a film to watch once, but one to revisit over and over as your own understanding grows. We hope you enjoy.
For more on Structured Word Inquiry, see my webpage for practitioners here:
www.wordworksinternational.com
For a 2-page document introducing the theory, research and practice of SWI with multiple links to free resources for further study at this link:
files.realspel...
See many free resources and my published research on my About WordWorks page here:
www.wordworksk...
Contact me at: [e-mail]
Contact Marie Foley at: [e-mail].
Don’t forget to explore Marie's FB Group: "Making Sense of English Using Scientific Inquiry" to see the large archive of brilliant videos she uses in her own tutoring with students.
PS: This film does not directly address grapheme-phoneme correspondences. However, grapheme choice for a given phoneme for a given word is driven by morphological and etymological influences. So this film provides underlying understanding that teachers need to be able to explain many grapheme-phoneme correspondences. I hope to construct another in-depth collaborative film with Marie on how grapheme-phoneme correspondences work in our orthography system-what I call “orthographic phonology.” For an introduction to understanding how grapheme choice is constrained and explained by morphology, seem my video on that topic here:
http: • SWI teaches grapheme-p... )

[@melinabrook5150]

Beautiful, thank you.

[@AnaRobins-h6p]

The visuals are really helpful. Thank you!

[@Seethebeautyindyslexia]

Love this, Thank you Marie. I will surely be adding this film to my Must See recommendations/resource list!

[@donnapaladino9523]

love this thank you!

[@neilmckee779]

Awesome, how about preclude?

[@WordWorksKingston]

Hey Neil, take note in the video around the 6 minute mark. You see that to check if "conclusion" is from the Latin 'claudere' family, you type the word in to Etymonline.com and follow the hot-links of other words to see if "conclusion" shares the "claudere" root that we found for "conclude". As you will see it is confirmed. I just typed your "preclude" into Etymonline and found this: 1610s, "prevent by anticipative action," from Latin praecludere "to close, shut off; hinder, impede," from prae "before, ahead" (see pre-) + claudere "to shut" (see close (v.)). The more literal sense of "close, shut up, prevent access to" (1620s) probably is obsolete. Related: Precluded; precluding. So we just confirmed the "meaning test" for your question of whether "preclude" is etymologically related to "conclude". If two words share the same historical root, they get their meaning connection from that history. The other test is the "structure test." That is, can you analyze "conclude" and "preclude" with a coherent word sum to show the same base. con + clude → conclude pre + clude → preclude There is lots of evidence for a PRE- prefix, so we have just demonstrated that your word "preclude" would be in the same morphological family as "conclude" "include" and "exclude"! They would all fit in the same matrix. Now you can think about how the orthographic denotation "shut, close" is reflected in the word "preclude." This makes sense to me. If you "preclude" something from happening, you close off that possibility! Hope that helps!

[@neilmckee779]

@@WordWorksKingston I am looking to bring this structured word inquiry into my teaching going forward. I like the idea to bring a more robust engagement with language rather than simply assigning spelling words. Using a structured word inquiring to me sounds very interesting. How I engender that interest in students is what I seek to figure out.

[@WordWorksKingston]

@@neilmckee779 Well Neil, I hope you look more into this work. There are links in my description of places to study. See my website at www.wordworksinternational.com. But more immediately, see this newsletter that points to upcoming courses if you want to take a closer look. It also includes videos of students engaged in SWI and many other resources. Find that here: files.realspellers.org/PetesFolder/Newsletters/WW_Newsletter_110_June_2023_New_Videos.pdf

[@LiannaNixBell]

And "seclude/seclusion" are etymologically related