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Students in a content-area reading course examined the vocabulary of each of their disciplines, focusing on recurrent roots and affixes. They wanted to become teachers of math, science, English, music, and history; therefore, they needed to learn discipline-specific morphemes so they could help their future students figure out new words in their content areas. The students: analyzed words in their disciplinary vocabularies, using recurrent roots and affixes to aid in comprehension of word meaning;, adapted traditional reading strategies for disciplinary use;, discovered that many roots and affixes which were seemingly particular to one discipline also contributed to the meanings of words in other disciplines;, designed content-area lessons using a morphemic approach., The class learned that teaching the meanings of morphemes could improve disciplinary literacy and could also help with vocabulary in other content areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores several strategies that can be implemented by upper elementary, middle, and high school teachers to help students develop their general vocabulary knowledge while also increasing their comprehension of content area words and concepts. Particular focus is given to methods in which teachers allow students to explore the etymology of words through an understanding of roots, prefixes, and suffixes that are common to the English language. Other topics explored include morphological knowledge, direct instruction, and spelling-meaning connections.