Publications

Research Brief – Learning to Read while Learning a Language: Reading and English Learners

Trish Morita-Mullaney, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Purdue University

February 2025

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The Science of Reading (SOR) is intended to benefit all children as they develop a strong foundation in reading. For a growing number of students who have proficiencies in languages other than English, how they experience SOR classroom activities differs. Students who are learning English as an additional language come from a variety of language backgrounds and enter at different levels of English proficiency, ranging from beginner to advanced. This research brief provides a linguistic landscape of Indiana’s K-12 students, followed by a review of the research on how certain components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency) are different for identified-English learners (ELs). 

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The linguistic landscape of Indiana’s K-12 students

Indiana is home to students who speak 296 different languages, most of whom are born in the United States and whose parents are devoted to both their home language maintenance their development in English. The current population of English learners who have a language background other than English accounts for over 148,000 students with 93,625 students requiring English language development services by certified personnel (Morita-Mullaney, 2022). Indiana requires that when a district has at least 30 identified-ELs, then a licensed English as a Second Language teacher must serve as their teacher of record (McCormick, 2019). 

Supreme Court course cases ensure that identified-ELs receive an accessible and meaningful education. Lau v. Nichols (1974) states that the “same education is not an equal education” and as such, meaningful efforts and resources must be furnished to make such education accessible. Castañeda v. Pickard (1981) goes a step further stating that identified-ELs must have an education that is 1) based on sound educational theory for ELs; 2) adequately resourced; and 3) found to be effective. Several federal statutes articulate a legal right for identified-ELs to a “meaningful and reasonable” education, including the Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA)–the federal authorization within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Within these statutes, districts and schools commit to provisions of making instruction accessible to them while they are moving through the English language development process and holding fast to the three-pronged rule as articulated above in Castañeda. 

How reading is different for identified-ELs

Phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency are foundational reading skills. This section reviews three key ways in which developing these skills is different for identified-ELs.  

Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the capacity to identify sounds and manipulate them. Typical activities related to phonemic awareness include rhyming. For example, a teacher might have students say “mop” and “top” and recognize that the initial sounds are different. For identified-ELs, they are accustomed to hearing different phonemes in their home languages; thus, they draw upon those more familiar sounds to connect to English. When identified-EL students are asked if a sound is correct, they may be unsure because for them, it is not yet familiar. Because of these linguistic differences and challenges, ELs are often seen as “at risk;” yet when we look at the principles of second language acquisition, they are doing what linguists would expect – using their existing and sophisticated linguistic knowledge to receptively hear sounds and re/produce them in ways that is shaped by their language histories. There is a linguistic logic to what they hear and express. 

Phonics

Phonics involves the matching of sounds to the symbols that represent them by connecting sounds to individual or groups of letters. More specifically, how students move from simple phonemes; to the graphemes they see in text and how they make such correspondences is at the core of phonics instruction (Ehri, 2020). As with phonemic awareness, ELs may not be able to discriminate between similar sounds. For example, for the letter ‘a’ in the word ‘cat’ and ‘had’ sound similar, but the word ‘rare’ and ‘care’ have a different sound production. While these differences are noticeable to an English majority speaker, such sounds may not be discriminated as well by an EL student at the earlier stages of their English language development.  Further, English does not have an exact sound to symbol correspondence, often complicating English phonics learning when ELs are at the earliest stages of their English language development (e.g. level 1 newcomer). 

Fluency

Reading fluency is described by three key characteristics:1) accuracy; 2) pace; and 3) prosody/expression. In practice this often requires students to read passages accurately, at a decent pace and that they do so with voice modulation and expression. For identified-ELs, their understanding of particular letters and sounds is mediated by their first or other languages and students draw upon these resources, impacting how accurate they may sound when reading. For example, if a Spanish-speaking reads the word “jam” as “ham”, this is mediated by the letter “j” having an /h/ sound in Spanish, so for them, this is an accurate production. Yet, in practice, this reading is rendered as inaccurate and instructional placements are made without this linguistic understanding of their first language. 

For pace, if a child reads too slowly it will impede comprehension; so a relatively quick cadence is needed to facilitate understanding (Rasinski & Padak, 2013). Yet, research of identified-ELs shows that while they do read more slowly, this does not necessarily hamper comprehension (Ramirez, 2000). ELs engage in the sophisticated metalinguistic process of making connections in their other languages to English, often impacting the pace and rhythm of their reading. 

Expression or prosody within second language acquisition comes at a later stage in English language development process. How language is used in different contexts and social situations, includes using and adapting language, as well as the ability to pick up on nuances that convey a particular voice to a reading (Lightbown & Spada, 2013). Social expectations and understandings vary across languages and cultures, so even if you are quite proficient in another language, understanding the social cues of expression come much later in the language development process. Thus, when ELs have a monotone narration as they read, they can be identified as lacking fluency in reading, when it is really an indicator of where they are in the English language development process.

Conclusion

Many decisions are made about ELs’ performances within SOR related activities that do not consider their level of English proficiency. Furthermore, much SOR content is not typically a part of teacher preparation, providing teachers with one set of tools for interpreting ELs’ performances. For researchers and practitioners considering ELs within SOR related activities, careful attention should be paid to the principles of second language development, understanding their systems of their first language (e.g. what sounds differ or are absent in their first language) and recognizing that English language development does not always keep pace with the linguistic demands of reading.  

References

Castañeda v. Pickard, 648 F. 2d 989 (5th Cir. 1981).  

Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241 (1964)  

Ehri, L. C. (2020). The Science of Learning to Read Words: A Case for Systematic Phonics Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S45–S60.  

Every Student Succeeds Act, Pub. L. No. Public Law 114-95, (2015).  

Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974). (1974).  

Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. M. (2013). How languages are learned (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. 

McCormick, J. (2019). English Learner Teacher of Record Frequently Asked Questions. Indiana Department of Education, Indianapolis, IN. 

Morita-Mullaney, T. (2022). Reckoning with Hammers and Mallets: Indiana’s Approach to Licensing English Learner Teachers. Indiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, 19(1), 76-101. https://doi.org/10.18060/26562  

Ramirez, J. D. (2000). Bilingualism and Literacy: Problem or Opportunity? A Synthesis of Reading Research on Bilingual Students. Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA), Washington, DC. 

Rasinski, T. V., & Padak, N. (2013). From fluency to comprehension : powerful instruction through authentic reading (1st ed.). Guilford Press. 

Research Brief – Knowledge of Morphological Structure and its connection to reading and writing

Chenell Loudermill, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Clinical Professor, Purdue University

April 2025

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Within the body of literature that provides sound evidence of reading and writing development and disorders, knowledge of morphological structure has been found to play a crucial role. Specifically, awareness of morphological structure (e.g., morphological awareness) serves as an avenue for improving vocabulary, word reading, spelling and reading comprehension. This research brief provides an overview of morphology and morphological awareness, why it is important for reading and writing, how morphological awareness contributes to the aforementioned skills, and considerations for non-native English speakers.

Morphology and Morphological Awareness

In language-spoken or written-morphology refers to the study of how words are formed. As spoken and written language develops, we learn to talk with words but we rarely talk about how words are formed. The English language is morphophomenic in nature which means the words are composed of parts that represent both sound and meaning. Therefore, it is necessary to not only strategically address the sounds in words but also the meaning of words, down to their smallest parts. A morpheme refers to the smallest, meaningful unit within a word. Morphemes can be free, meaning they stand alone, or bound, meaning they work in combination with other morphemes. Free morphemes typically include content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and function words such as prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs and articles. Bound morphemes include Latin and Greek roots (e.g., Latin: dict which means to say as in predict; Greek: tri, which means three as in triangle). Bound morphemes must be combined with free morphemes to form words. In K-12 education, bound morphemes are often referred to as roots or stems.

Types of Morphology

Three types of morphology have been identified in literature: inflectional, compound and derivational morphology.

• Inflectional morphology refers to how grammatical functions are marked. It includes understanding and use of word formation rules to form simple plurals, verb forms and possessive forms (Kou & Anderson, 2006). In inflected word forms, the word class (or part of speech) stays the same and involves high-frequency, obligatory grammatical suffixes (e.g., -s,   -ed, -ing).
• Compound morphology is the process of combining individual morphemes or words that can stand alone to form a new word with a different meaning. For example, in compounding, the words rain and bow both refer to two different items. One refers to visible drops of condensed moisture that fall from the sky. The other refers to a knot tied with two loops and two loose ends. By combining these two words together (rain + bow) we get a new word form, rainbow, with a completely different meaning.
• Derivational morphology refers to the basic units of word formation and the principles that guide their combination (Tyler & Nagy, 1987). Derivational morphemes change the part of speech when added to base or root words. Acquiring knowledge of derivational morphology is typically a longer process than acquiring inflectional or compound morphological knowledge, continuing to develop even into adulthood. Three types of derivational morphology knowledge have been documented- relational, syntactic, and distributional knowledge (Tyler & Nagy, 1987).

Types of Derivational Morphology

• Relational knowledge refers to the ability to recognize the stem of morphologically complex words and understand the relationship between the stem and the suffix, in other words, knowing where derived words come from. For example, understanding that the word painter comes from paint or width comes from wide would imply that one has relational knowledge.
• Syntactic knowledge refers to the ability to identify the part of speech of a word after the suffix has been added. For example, if the suffix -able is added to the word collect, it becomes collectable. While collect standing alone is a verb, adding the suffix able changes collect to collectable, transforming it to a noun.
• Distributional knowledge refers to the ability to understand how affixes are constrained by the syntactic category of the stem. In other words, knowing which prefixes and suffixes can be added to certain words and which ones cannot is an indication of one’s distributional knowledge. For example, the prefix re- can be added to the words model and play to form remodel and replay but re cannot be added to the words chair or door to form *rechair or *redoor.

Morphological Awareness

Simply put, morphological awareness is the ability to manipulate morphemes and employ word formation rules. More explicitly, morphological awareness is described by Apel (2014) as an awareness of the following: 1) spoken and written forms of morphemes, 2) the meaning of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and the changes in meaning and grammatical class they bring to base words/roots, 3) how written affixes connect to base words/roots, and 4) the relationship between base words/roots and their inflected or derived forms. Morphological knowledge begins to develop as early as the preschool years and most children are able to verbally express themselves using appropriate grammatical forms; however, they are usually not aware of the rules that dictate that usage.

Why morphological awareness is important for reading and writing

Approximately 80% of English words are morphologically complex (Anglin 1993; Hiebert, Goodwin, & Crevetti, 2018). When learners encounter unfamiliar words, they attempt to look for recognizable parts of words to adequately decode text tapping into knowledge from various systems-linguistic (phonological, morphological and syntactic), orthographic (word identification and recognition), and lexical (word meaning). These same systems activated for decoding (reading) are also activated for encoding (spelling) in reverse order. Therefore, Morphological awareness impacts word reading, reading comprehension and spelling (Carlisle, 2003; Denston et al., 2018; Levesque et al., 2021).  Morphological awareness is also associated with word reading and spelling from first grade and beyond, and by at least second grade, morphological awareness is more strongly related to reading comprehension than other language or reading skills such as phonological awareness (for a review, see McBride, 2016). Additionally, studies show evidence of the influence of morphological awareness in the development of vocabulary knowledge (Bowers et al., 2010; McBride-Chang et al., 2008; Pan et al., 2023); and reading subskills such as lexical inferencing, spelling, and word identification (Ke & Xiao, 2015). Learners rely on their knowledge of the morphological structure of words as they interact with print-reading or writing-as they work to understand or generate ideas. Literacy learners benefit from explicit instruction in meaningful word parts. There is a bidirectional association between morphological awareness in language and literacy development (Levesque et al., 2021) which should be supported through a structured literacy approach based on the science of reading. 

How morphological awareness contributes to reading and writing

Previous research provided ample evidence of the influence of morphological awareness on the development of specific literacy skills, but questions remained as to how. Levesque, et al. (2021) provided a Morphological Pathways Framework to help explain how morphological awareness contributes to reading and writing. In this framework, the relationship between reading and spelling is explicit, implicit and bidirectional between several systems-linguistic, orthographic, and lexical. The linguistic system supports development of the orthographic system where children learn letter-sound mapping of syllables, morphemes, and whole words. Learners retrieve orthographic (spelling) and phonological (sound) units for reading and spelling through the central orthographic processes. In turn, the orthographic system supports the development of the linguistic system. This process facilities the learner’s ability to engage in morphological decoding and word identification during reading. The linguistic system also supports k-12 learners’ ability to engage in morphological analysis (breaking words down into meaningful parts). Since morphemes carry meaning, morphological analysis facilitates the learner’s understanding of word meaning by examining the individual parts, increasing word level comprehension and expanding vocabulary knowledge. Expanding the learner’s vocabulary contributes to the development of the linguistic and orthographic systems. Both morphological decoding and morphological analysis facilitate text comprehension supporting the development of general knowledge and written expression. For a complete explanation of the Morphological Pathways Framework see Levesque et al.

Morphological awareness considerations for non-native English speakers

Morphological skills in a first language can sometimes facilitate language and literacy learning in a second language (e.g., Deacon et al., 2007; Koda, 2000; Leonet, et al., 2020). Therefore, children should be encouraged to develop language skills in their native language as well as the language to be acquired. However, it is important to note that morphological skills important for reading are somewhat confined by the constraints in each language (e.g., McBride et al., 2022). For example, morphological awareness may be measured differently in different languages and can sometimes be more difficult to assess in a foreign language as compared to a first language (e.g., Pan et al., 2023). Nevertheless, explicit instruction in morphology can improve oral and written language skills in learners across languages (e.g., Carlisle, 2010). Despite differences in morphology across languages, morphological awareness contributes to vocabulary development (McBride et al., 2008) and is thought to be a sharable resource across languages, supporting both language and literacy development. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, understanding morphology is essential for learners as it significantly impacts literacy development. There are three types of morphology described in the literature: inflectional, compound, and derivational. Three types of derivational morphology include relational, syntactic and distributional. A large majority of words  encountered by learners are morphologically complex and require more than letter-sound knowledge. As teachers provide instruction in language, reading and writing with words it is just as important to talk about how those words are formed. Knowledge of morphological structure positively impacts word recognition, vocabulary knowledge, and the ability to comprehension text (Carlisle, 2003, Denston et al., 2018).

References

Apel, K. (2014). A comprehensive definition of morphological awareness: Implications for assessment. Topics in Language Disorders, 34(3), 197–209. https://doi.org/10.1097/TLD.0000000000000019

Anglin, J.M. (1993). Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 58(10, Serial no. 238) 1-186,, https://doi.org/10.2307/1166112

Bowers, P. N., Kirby, J. R., & Deacon, S. H. (2010). The Effects of Morphological Instruction on Literacy Skills: A systematic review of the literature. Review of educational research, 80(2), 144-179. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654309359353

Carlisle, J. F. (2003) Morphology matters in learning to read: A commentary. Reading Psychology, 24(3-4), 291-322, https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710390227369

Carlisle, J. F. (2010). Effects of Instruction in Morphological Awareness on Literacy Achievement: An Integrative Review. Reading Research Quarterly. 45(4). 464-487. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.45.4.5

Deacon, S. H., Wade-Woolley, L., & Kirby, J. (2007). Crossover: The role of morphological aware-ness in French immersion children’s reading. Developmental Psychology, 43(3), 732-746. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.43.3.732

Denston, A., Everatt, J., Parkhill, F., & Marriott, C. (2018). Morphology: Is it a means by which teachers can foster literacy development in older primary students with literacy learning difficulties? The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 41(2), 94-102. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03652010

Hiebert, E.H., Goodwin, A.P. & Cervetti, G.N. (2018). Core vocabulary: Its  morphological content an presence in exemplar texts. Reading Research Quaterly, 53, 29-49. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.183

Ke, S., & Xiao, F. (2015). Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness between Chinese and English. Language Awareness, 24(4), 355–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2015.1114624

Koda, K. (2000). Cross-linguistic variations in L2 morphological awareness. Applied Psycholin-guistics, 21(3), 297-320. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716400003015

Ku, Y. M., & Anderson, R. C. (2003). Development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English. Reading and Writing, 16(5), 399-422. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024227231216

Kuo, L., & Anderson, R.C. (2006). Morphological awareness and learning to read: A cross-language perspective. Educational Psychologist, 41(3), 161-180. doi: 10.1207/s15326985ep4103_3

Leonet, O., Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2020). Developing morphological awareness across languages: Translanguaging pedagogies in third language acquisition., Language Awareness, 29(1), 41-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2019.1688338

Levesque, K. C., Breadmore, H. L., Deacon, S. H. (2021). How morphology impacts reading and spelling: advancing the role of morphology in models of literacy development. Journal of Research in Reading, 44(1). 10-26.  https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12313

McBride, C. (2016). Children’s literacy development: A cross-cultural perspective on learning to read and write (2nd ed.). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

McBride, C., Pan, D. J., & Mohseni, F. (2022). Reading and writing words: A cross-linguistic perspective. Scientific studies of Reading. 26(2). 125-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2021.1920595

McBride-Chang, C. A., Tardif, T., Cho, J. R., Shu, H. U. A., Flether, P., Strokes, S. F., … Leung, K . (2008). What’s in a word? Morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in three languages. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29(3), 437-462. https://doi.org/10.1017/S014271640808020X

Tyler, A., & Nagy, W. (1987). The acquisition of English derivational morphology.

(Technical Report No. 407). Champaign, IL: Center for the Study of Reading.

Pan, D. J., Nakayama, M., McBride, C., Cheah, Z. R. E., Zheng, M., & Yeung, C. C. L. (2023). Cognitive-linguistic skills and vocabulary knowledge breadth and depth in children’s L1 Chinese and L2 English. Applied Psycholinguistics 44(1), 77-99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716422000480