More emphasis needs to be placed on meaning when teaching children how to break compound words into their constituent parts.

“All I see is a bunch of words.  Until you know the words, they’re just a bunch of letters.  You have to turn them into normal words by going over them again and again.”  This poignant and articulate insight from a dyslexic Year 3 child reveals just how puzzling texts can appear to young readers and how long they can take to decode, especially for children who are struggling with reading. 

How can teachers help young readers see the wood for the trees?  Phonics helps a great deal, but because nearly a third of words in English are not phonically regular, children need a whole range of strategies to decode new words, including word structure.

A basic knowledge of word structure helps young readers to deconstruct longer unknown words by recognising constituent parts that each carry meaning and then reconstructing them into a whole.  Official guidance (DCFS, 2009) gives the impression that word structure is the servant of spelling, whereas I would argue that word structure needs attention in its own right as an important tool in decoding meaning and could be introduced as early as Year 2.

The main part of a word, known as a base, root or stem, is a vital building block of language, which can be added to in various ways.   The base word ‘play’ can, for example, be joined up with another one to become a compound word like ‘playground’ or ‘playtime’.  Children will enjoy playing around with other base words, such as ‘foot’ (‘football’) or ‘class’ (‘classroom’), becoming more adept at constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing different words, gaining a sense of ownership over written language.

The most common prefixes and suffixes are very useful in making sense of how words are built up and how the meaning of the base word is often changed in the process.  In fact, children might like to see themselves as ‘reading detectives’ looking for clues in words.

The most easily recognisable prefixes for this age group are ‘re’, meaning ‘again’, which gives ‘replay’ and ‘rewrite’ and ‘un’ meaning ‘not’, which gives ‘unhappy’ and ‘undo’, for example.  Prefixes often change meaning more dramatically than suffixes, for instance, ‘disappear’ or ‘decode’ where the prefix reverses the meaning of the base word.  Not all prefixes are negative, ‘re’, as we have seen, means ‘again’ and ‘pre’ means ‘before’, as in ‘prehistory’.    

Children could be shown how various suffixes bring new emphases in meaning.  For example, ‘-ing’ at the end of a word usually means it’s happening; with ‘-ed’, it’s happened, with ‘-er’ the person doing the action (though this ending also applies to comparatives, such as ‘faster’); and ‘-ful’ at the end of a word means ‘full of’.  (See the DCSF Support for Spelling document, Year 3, Term 2 (ii) for more on suffixes.)

Prefixes and suffixes are morphemes, that is, any part of a word, however small, which carries distinct meaning.  Even the single letter ‘s’ at the end of a word usually means ‘more than one’.  With the word ‘uncomfortable’, for example, the base word is of course ‘comfort’, with ‘un’ as the prefix reversing the meaning and ‘able’ as the suffix.  (For a fuller list of prefixes and suffixes, see www.uefap.com/vocab/build/building.htm, more useful for older children.)

Young readers find it hard to deconstruct words, to make sense of ‘bunches of letters’, so an effective way is to teach them to build up from a base word.  For example, a large graphic of a Word Wall with stick-on words, such as the base word ‘look’ and various suffixes, can illustrate the process very clearly.  This is what I did in the animation of Bill the Brickie in the BBC Schools Television series, ‘Look and Read’ and the song goes:  ‘Why don’t you build yourself a word?/ Build yourself a word with an ing/ To say it’s happening./  Take look and ing./  Altogether now/ Look-ing, look-ing (see www.youtube.com, Bill the Brickie). 

Variations on this song featured ‘ed means it’s happened’ and compound words built up with ‘some’ and ‘any’ as the base words.  Children could take it in turns to be Bill the Brickie building up the wall and enjoy the challenge of combining things to make a new whole.

There are activities and games based on word structure in Phase 6 of the DCSF document, ‘Letters and sounds’ and in the Ruth Miskin Literacy Intervention Programme.  These help to build up automatic recognition of the constituent parts of words, by breaking words into syllables, but children would benefit from more focus on meaning.

When reading with children on a one-to-one basis, hiding the prefix, suffix or second base word with your finger will help them to deconstruct the word and then reconstruct it to get its full meaning.  As a Year 3 child said, “If you know one part of the word you can break down, like ‘into’, you say ‘in’ and then ‘to’ and then you push them together’”.  Another child at an earlier stage of understanding who told me, “I sound it [the word] out or I cut up the letters”, needed more practice in splitting words up into bits that were meaningful.

The meaning found in word structure is vital in understanding a text, but only as part of a whole range of strategies to draw on, including phonics, sight vocabulary and context cues (see my article on context cues on this website).  Offering a wide range of reading strategies means that all children, especially those with special needs, can develop more effectively into independent readers.

Readers

BBC Schools Television, ‘Look and Read’

The National Strategies: Primary, ‘Support for Spelling’, DCSF, 2009

Primary National Strategy, ‘Letters and Sounds’, DES, 2007

Ruth Miskin Literacy Intervention Programme

Published in Literacy Today, No 63, June 2010