Morphological Awareness: Connecting Language Foundations and Academic Literacy Success for Students With Language and Literacy Deficits

Purpose: For school-age students with language and literacy deficits (LLD), such as those with developmental language disorder (DLD) and/or dyslexia, literacy challenges can affect reading comprehension, written language, and overall academic success. Researchers have established that instruction in morphological awareness, especially with a phonological, orthographic, semantic, and syntactic focus, results in positive reading and writing outcomes. The purpose of this clinical focus article is to provide evidence for a multilinguistic literacy intervention approach grounded in morphological awareness, along with a case-based tutorial for its implementation in a relevant academic context. Method: Focusing on the morphological meaning components within words provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on how these units provide clues and support to other linked language components such as phonology or word pronunciation, orthographic spelling, semantic meaning, and syntactic grammar. A discussion is provided for leveraging morphological awareness across a multilinguistic literacy intervention approach to connect foundational linguistic knowledge and bridge strategy, meaning, and purpose. We address how this intervention can be integrated with a classroom curricular unit and implemented via individual, small-group, or classroom-based intervention using a case-based example. Conclusions: Morphological awareness intervention has been found to be effective in supporting the vocabulary, decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension of students with LLD. Thus, infusing this metalinguistic strategy in multilinguistic literacy intervention that integrates academically relevant texts can be a powerful tool for speech-language pathologists and literacy specialists to support the literacy success of students with DLD and/or dyslexia.