Morphology Made Simple: Easy Ways to Teach Affixes in Speech Therapy

Today we are chatting about some strategies that we can use when targeting prefixes and suffixes with our students. This is one of my favorite strategies in terms of vocabulary, because prefixes and suffixes are so common. Honig et al 2013 say that the four most common prefixes and suffixes account for 97% of derivational words.

I am all about working smarter and not harder. If I can focus on four affixes and give students the tools to break down that many words, just with that one little tool like that gives us a lot of bang for our buck. So let's chat about how we can break this down. The first strategy is to help students understand what affixes are and how morphology works.

I would start off instruction by giving some specific examples of how a prefix or a suffix changes a word. One common suffix is -s. If we have a cat and then we add -s to it, that means there are multiple cats. So by adding that suffix, it changes the meaning of the word.

If we know what these little words mean, it can help us figure out what words mean if we know some parts of the word. It's a helpful strategy. It doesn't work for all students. Some students need explicit instruction and teaching of explicit vocabulary targets.

This is a strategy worth trying to see if it helps our students. So that the first strategy, like I said, was just explicitly teaching and helping students understand how morphology works. The second step is to explicitly teach selected prefixes and suffixes. In SLP Now, we have visuals, with the prefix, a student friendly definition, an icon to help represent what the prefix means, as well as some examples.

And so we can use this to introduce the word. They're just little cards. We can use them throughout our instruction. I like to print these off and give students their own card, so they can reference it and have some ownership.

It's like collecting Pokemon cards. Once they tell me what the word means, they get it, and then they can use that to write all the examples of the word that they're finding. For example, if we're targeting re- as a prefix, they would get that card.

If words are coming up as we're doing all of the literacy based therapy activities, they can add those to their cards and build a vocabulary journal.

They're seeing the visual and the student friendly definition. It's two strategies in one. We want to teach the specific meaning of the prefixes and suffixes. A bonus tip is using those definition cards to help students, embed that practice across multiple units as well.

In our Prefixes Skill Pack, we have word cards that can help students get more structured practice. We give you a list of words with the most common prefixes, and then you can pair that with our graphic organizer. And I would first start by modeling this strategy, but the graphic organizer has boxes for a prefix, the root, and the suffix.

So like if the word is disagree, we would first identify. the prefix, root, and suffix if there is one. And then they write dis- in the prefix box, agree in the root, and then it kind of walks them through the process of. Okay, first we have to identify the prefix, root, and suffix.

Then we find the meaning of the prefix and the meaning of the root, and we put those meanings together to infer the meaning, and then we can, put it in the sentence to kind of check that meaning. I start by modeling that process. Once students have multiple examples, I gradually decrease what I'm showing them. We do it together first then they do it with me, and then they get to kind of do it more on their own. But teaching that process of breaking the words apart and really being like taking out their magnifying glasses and looking for our target prefixes and suffixes can be really beneficial.

We just would continue to target and practice this skill. it makes sense to start with discreet skill instruction, where we walk through how morphology works, what prefixes and suffixes are, and then we explicitly walk them through the process of how to be a word detective and break words apart and identify the meaning and how those strategies work.

In addition to actually teaching the meaning of those prefixes in suffixes.

And then the last step is to bring this into context. The trick of giving students cards for their target prefixes and suffixes and having them look for examples of that throughout all of the units, throughout the entire IEP period, can be really helpful.

And then for additional support in helping you contextualize this practice. In SLP Now, we've analyzed all of our picture books, articles, and science experiments, all of our therapy plans. We've pulled all of the relevant targets. You can search for a specific prefix in suffix and find articles that have those words in them.

We also create book and article specific activities for you where it gives you a graphic organizer that you can use to practice that word. it has spots to add other examples of the word as you go through different units

So it's a way to build that vocabulary journal and implement other evidence-based vocabulary strategies, in terms of coming up with a sentence with a word in it and drawing a picture of the word. Those are bonus strategies embedded into the units. That is a quick blitz of some strategies we can use when targeting affixes.

If you want to access any of the activities that I shared today, head to slpnow.com and sign up for a free trial. You can download five activities, totally free, no strings attached. I'll also share a link to the show notes with more detail, in terms of research, citations and all of that.

Thank you for joining me today, and we'll see you in the next one.