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Abstract: This department column is a venue for thoughtful discussions of contemporary issues dealing with policy and practice, remixed in ways that generate new insights into enduring dilemmas, debates, and controversies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphological awareness-knowledge of roots and affixes within language and their interactions with one another to create multitudes of words-is arguably a skill requiring extended study beyond the elementary grades. With the rigors of contemporary curriculum that gradually guide students into college and career readiness-and, essentially, into literate citizenship-enhanced morphological awareness derived from specific study within a secondary curriculum is imperative for adolescents and, by extension, adult learners. This article outlines various facets of enhanced morphological awareness among adolescent learners, arguing its place as a necessary skill set to be included within a developmentally appropriate secondary curriculum. Theoretical bases for such skill development can be found in the aspects of both schema theory and psycholinguistic theory, and its development has also been justified in other related literature. These foundations manifest themselves in relevant classroom strategies that can enhance adolescents' literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphological awareness has been established as important to literacy success, and as such, it is critical to study factors affecting children’s performance on measures of this skill. Morphological transparency, or the clarity of the sound and letter pattern relationship between base words and their associated morphological forms, has been found to affect morphological awareness performance. An additional factor of imageability, or how clearly a word can be visualized, also could affect such performance. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of imageability, as it relates to transparency, on children’s morphological awareness responses. Seventy-two third-grade children completed a morphological awareness production task that included words controlled for transparency and imageability. Results of this mixed design revealed that imageability appeared to interact with transparency and words of high imageability were more readily produced than those of low imageability in conditions of low and high transparency. These results suggest that imageability should be considered when developing morphological awareness tasks aimed at measuring developmental expectations for school-age children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the clinical application of morphological awareness intervention to facilitate speech-deficit children's success in vocabulary, spelling, reading and phonology. It discusses the research-based and theoretical perspectives on this intervention in children with or without literacy and language deficiency. It also provides a case study demonstrating the application of this intervention and its outcomes.

Literacy is an increasingly important factor as schools focus on improving student achievement. Literacy skills in reading and writing are critical components needed for both access to the general curriculum and for successful academic achievement. A key component of reading and writing is word identification, a skill deficit for many adolescent students with learning disabilities. This article describes how we implemented Words Their Way, an explicit, inductive instructional approach to teach phonemic awareness, spelling patterns, and morphology to students in a ninth grade literacy class in an urban high school. The orthographic knowledge learned through word study is applied to word identification skills used in reading and writing. The article explains how we adapted this program for adolescents who are struggling with reading and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]