Constructing a morphological matrix from word sums: A door to understanding of English spelling

Описание: This video was provoked by seeing a colleague's process for helping students understand how to construct a morphological matrix from word sums. There is much overlap with how I have been doing it, but I think template, and process of going from word sum to matrix will help many people feel more comfortable making their own matrices.

Links at bottom of description.

As I address in this video, the matrix and word sum reveal the morphological structure of related words so effectively that it can be easy to miss the essential role they play in explaining grapheme-phoneme correspondences. If you have encountered "Structured Word Inquiry" (SWI) (Bowers & Kirby, 2010), it is likely that a matrix is what you remember most. The potential for vocabulary development is often the first application teachers think of--and for good reason. The study that introduced SWI was a Grade 4/5 vocabulary intervention that showed students in the experimental condition gained in vocabulary even for words they did not encounter in the teaching, as long as those words shared a base with a word they did encounter.

However, when you actually study the matrix by learning to construct them independently, you are likely to notice how much clarity they bring to the grapheme-phoneme correspondences. My experience is that those that struggle with literacy are most immediately grabbed by this point. I was terrible speller in my 9th year as a grade school teacher when I encountered my first matrix. The first word that caught me was "really" because I had just misspelled that word *realy, and no-one could help me understand why my guess was wrong. But is was the spelling and pronunciation of the word "reality" that totally blew my mind. That clarified why "real" for "a real nice day" is spelled like that and not "reel" like a fishing reel. See me tell that story to a class here:
   • Pete teaches how he learned the structure ...  

This was my 9th year as a teacher and it was the first time I had ever been encouraged to look at morphology to help me understand grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The first matrix in our intervention used the word "sign" as the base so that I could show how words like "signal" and "signature." Including those words in a matrix highlighted the reason for the "g" in "sign" that could not be explained without morphology. They also provide an example of a suffixing change to reveal with a word sum. We then use word sums to prove the three suffixing conventions. See my teacher resource book based on those lessons here:
https://wordworkskingston.com/WordWor...

Other people's stories are only valuable, however, if they motivate you to start trying to construct your own matrices. When you do that, you will have your own discoveries of interesting connections in the spelling, meanings and pronunciations of many words. The main purpose of this video is to share a template and process you could apply creating a matrix from any set of word sums that share a base.

If you watch the full video, you will learn of a way to test your matrices so you can identify and learn from any mistakes.

I hope to create two more related videos. One would put this work in the research context. Another would show the process of finding words and analyzing them with word sums so that you can safely begin the process of constructing your own matrices.

Links:
www.wordworkskingston.com

See the video I mentioned on morphological and etymological families I made with Marie Foley here:

   • How Morphological and Etymological Familie...  

See a 15 min video focusing on understanding how grapheme-phoneme correspondences are constrained and explained by morphology here:

   • SWI teaches grapheme-phoneme correspondenc...  

I recommend conventions for what I call "spelling-out orthography" that should be used in conjunction with constructing word sums and matrices.

See a video of two children spelling-out graphemes and morphemes here:

   • Writing-out-loud orthographic structure in...  

See a video of a student using this process to self-correct on the spelling of "surface" here:

   • Spelling-Out Orthography in SWI to build g...  

See my page on this topic with tons of resources and an interview explaining the process and its implications here:

See a video of a student using this process to self-correct on the spelling of "surface" here:

https://wordworkskingston.com/WordWor...

See a talk on the theory, research and practice of SWI in April 2024 at Bristol University here:

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/r...

"About WordWorks" has many links to get started. At the bottom is most of my published research. See that here:

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/r...