English Morphophonemic Writing

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 8

Salient Points:

There is no real definition of a word. For this reason, linguists talk about morphemes. Morphemes have three parts:

1. the form, or "a unit of language that usually consists of a sequence of sounds" (pp. 122).
2. meaning--grammatical meaning or meaning with content.
3. minimal form that can be broken down into smaller meaningful units.

There are several kinds of morphemes as well:

1. free morphemes--words themselves, like "sun" or "moon."
2. bound morphemes--morphemes that are attached to other free or bound morphemes, such as words with prefixes or suffixes, like "undo" or "comical."
3. derivational morphemes--a new word created from a base word and prefixes or suffixes are added, such as "careless" or "carelessness." They also change the part of speech of the base word.
4. bound roots--a root that has to have a prefix or a suffix and cannot stand alone, such as "precept" and "supervise."
5. inflectional morphemes--a bound morpheme that "adds additional grammatical information or inflections to a word, without creating a new word" (pp. 124), such as the "-ed" ending or "s" ending. The part of speech does not usually change and the inflectional morpheme in English is always a suffix.

Sometimes pronunciation changes with morpheme changes. This is called assimilation, because the mouth is trying to make it easier to say. It makes speaking the word more efficient. The kinds of assimilation are palatalization (suppress to suppression), velar softening (electric to electricity), vowel laxing (divine to divinity), stress change with vowel reduction (when vowels are reduced to a schwa--grammar to grammatical), and stem changes (receive to reception).

Our writing system has both morphemes and phonemes, making it morphophonemic. It represents the sounds and the consistency of morphemes. Why do we have spellings like "physics" and not "fiziks?" Why do have two letters for the /k/ sound? Why does "ph"=/f/? Why does the "s" in physics sound like /z/? The problems with the English writing system is in writing and spelling, not reading. "The expert reader can read grammar, definite, or misspell with no difficulty" (pp. 129). Native English speakers build up a morphological storage in their brains of all kinds of morphemes and phonemes. They develop word recognition from their semantic memory. They then use words in their semantic memory to figure out the meaning of new words. However, this can be difficult for ELLs, because they do not have this automatic processing of patterns. Some ELLs do not use the grapheme to phoneme strategy at all (phonological processing) and instead use a meaning-based strategy. There may be some morphological interference between the L1 and the L2.

Pg. 133-134--Not all language follow the same morphological patterns. There are four types of morphology:

isolating (Chinese)--(segmentable morphemes) one segmentable morpheme per word or words

fusional (Spanish)--(nonsegmentable morphemes) more than one morpheme per word and the morphemes canon be broken down into parts

polysynthetic (Tuscarora)--(nonsegmentable morphemes) words can be made up of many morphemes, but the individual morphemes are difficult to separate

agglutinating (Turkish)--(segmentable morphemes) many morphemes and easy to segment the morphemes within a word.

Implications:

• We as teachers must be experts at English morphology, so that we can better understand how to teach the language as well as understand the struggle of some students, who make experience interference with their language and English.
• We can also know the four types of morphology, so that we can understand how to teach the variety of ELLs in our classrooms. For example, if we know that Spanish (a fusional language) has multiple inflectional verb ends and gender subject-verb-object agreements, we can understand any mistakes they may make. If we know that Hebrew or Arabic has infixed morphological changes, than we can teach them about the prefixes and suffixes in English.
• We as teachers must teach the morphological patterns in English, and the different pronunciations.
• We must also teach how writing is morphophonemic and that the spellings themselves are pronounced differently than they look. Even these different spellings have patterns that we can teach. We want to reduce the cognitive load on our students, so teaching them the consistencies in English morphology can do that. It will also lower the affective filter of our students.