Morphology in teaching reading—Freeman & Freeman

Words are made up with meaningful parts while not all of the parts are relevant to the word itself, which makes morphological knowledge difficult to apply during reading. Therefore, Freeman and Freeman emphasized a lot about not to sue structural analysis to teach language learners vocabularies, saying that knowing the parts of the word do not help pronounce words and learn the meaning of the word. I think this can be true in many cases and I also agree that sometimes the existing knowledge of parts of the word may not help get accurate new knowledge of the whole word, which could be frustrating to the learners. Then, how can we language teachers help develop students’ vocabulary?

Freeman and Freeman suggest that when teaching learner new words, we should let them know the concept of a word instead of the definition of the word. One approach is to use a variety of activities to build background to learn words before reading. Extensive reading helps vocabulary learning as well. According to the case study on Page 201, it has been approves that students who are read to a lot have better vocabulary knowledge. I was wondering what kind of reading it was that the teacher did for the students. Obviously, it should not just the teacher reading, but what did the teacher ask the students do before/after that? Picking up words from a story is another way to build up students’ vocabulary. Thinking of many English teachers in China still pre-teach the new words before getting into texts, I can’t help worrying about students’ outcome of their learning. Reading Chapter 9 on the application from morphology of teaching English, I feel ashamed about my own teaching methods too. However, I have confidence that I can do better in the future.