As an SLP, you probably know you should be doing some type of grammar intervention in your therapy.
It’s clear our students have poor grammatical skills impacting their reading and writing performance, but many of us feel we lack a good road map for solving this issue.
So what do we end up doing?
Well…I know for some of us (myself included), we end up targeting the same goals for grammar intervention over and over again, unsure of whether or not we’re doing the right thing.
Maybe we write goals for verb tenses. Or maybe we write a goal for saying “is” and “are”. I’ve even see grammar intervention that focused solely on getting students to use pronouns correctly.
Now…if you’re writing goals for any of these skills, these IEP goals aren’t bad or wrong.
They may be appropriate based on the grammar intervention your students need. But, having said that, these goals aren’t ideal if we’re just targeting a random assortment of skills without seeing the “big picture.”
Which I know…if I’m being perfectly honest…I’ve definitely struggled to see the “big picture” a time or two when it comes to treating language. So if you feel the same you’re certainly not alone.
Any type of grammar intervention you do is unlikely to work if you’re just drilling flashcards, rote repeating sentences, or grabbing random grammar worksheets (using flashcards, worksheets, and sentence repetition aren’t bad practices; but they just need to be done within the right system).
If you feel like your grammar intervention lacks the right focus, or you aren’t seeing the results you know your students are capable of, I want to help you create a better system.
Many of us think morphological awareness is too advanced for most of our students…but as you read this article, you’re going to realize that’s not true.
Let’s start out by taking a look at a discussion that took place in the member’s only Facebook community of my Language Therapy Advance course for SLPs.
The question was this:
My elementary school student has average phonological awareness, but can’t spell. What should I do and what’s going on here?
Luckily another LTA student beat me to the punch with this follow-up question:
Have you thought about morphology?
My students’ instinct that this could be an issue of morphological awareness was right on.
Let’s talk about why this is so important for spelling, and why this applies to grammar intervention.
We’ll do this by looking at a couple words.
Bat
This word has three letters and we hear three distinct sounds, or phonemes. There is a 1:1 correspondence between sounds and letters. Paying attention to the sounds in the words can help us spell this word.
Here’s another example:
Trap
This word has three letters and four phonemes. Just like the other example, we can listen to the sounds in the word to help figure out how to spell it.
But what about these words?
Retake
Happiness
Unmistakable
There are some letter-sound correspondences here, but there’s not a 1:1 correspondence. Pairing one letter to one sound wouldn’t work here. Also, these words are considerably longer.
If we used phonology alone to “sound out” these words, we’d have to store each one in working memory considerably longer than we would for a shorter word.
Look at the word “unmistakable”. There are 11 phonemes in this word. We could teach our students to pair the phonemes with the letters one at a time, like this:
U n m i s t a k a b le (le and are together because the e is silent; and you would be saying the corresponding sound as you’re writing each letter).
The challenge with this is that this is a lot to process at once. There’s actually a more efficient way to spell this word, that’s more in line with how we’d realistically problem solve to figure out how to read and spell this word, and also infer what this word means if we haven’t seen it before.
Rather than looking at each phoneme individually, we’d be more likely to notice the morphemes. In the word “unmistakable”, we might notice these four morphemes:
Un…mis…take…able (we’d drop that e in “take” when we put the suffix on the end).
We might not even need to break the root apart completely here, because some of us would be able to remember the spelling well enough by doing this:
Un…mistake….able
Having to “read” and “spell” three or four units is a lot less taxing that 11 units, and research has actually shown that students are capable of applying morphological problem solving skills to do this type of analysis (Champion, 1997; McCutchen & Logan, 2011).
Phonological awareness is important because it can help us spell, read, and say words with just one morpheme. It can also help us to spell, read, and say words with multiple morphemes; but eventually we want students to be able to process morphemes as a unit rather than as individual sounds.
In other words, phonology is important; but we can’t stop there. We need morphology too.
Without knowledge of words and what they mean based on how they are built, we won’t be able to use them with grammatically correct sentences. This is why focusing on morphological awareness can be the missing element in the grammar intervention we do.
Let’s go back to some of the skills I mentioned before (e.g., verb tenses, copulas and auxiliary verbs). You can see how these goals might be helpful and relevant in some cases for targeting grammar. For example, we need knowledge of morphology in order to use the right verb tense.
The problem is, some of us stop our grammar intervention there. Morphology is more than just being able to add “ing”, “ed”, and “s” to the end of words. It also includes prefixes and suffixes that change the meaning and class of words (derivational morphemes).
If we fail to address these skills, our students may continue to have weak spelling and grammar skills.
The problem is that many of us aren’t really sure where to start. We wonder if our students need to be proficient readers before we can start working on morphology.
If you’ve ever felt unsure about how and when to start working on morphological awareness such as prefix and suffix knowledge, Kenn Apel and Victoria Henbest (2016) and published this article in Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools that will give you some much-needed answers.
But for now, think about those students who are in desperate need of spelling, reading, and grammar intervention. The cases where you wonder if they’re even capable of studying word parts, like prefixes, suffixes, roots and bases.
Or where you think, “They won’t be able to do it because they can’t read.”
Ask yourself, “Why can’t they read?” “Why aren’t they making progress?”
Is it because of poor morphological knowledge?
If weak morphological awareness is contributing to their reading and spelling difficulties, the answer is, “Yes”.
I share how to work on these skills in the Word Study Toolkit for SLPs.
…When students are still not making progress in reading, even though they’re practicing phonological awareness drills…
…When students can complete “spelling practice”, but then can’t remember how to spell a word the next day….
…Or when you realize your students just don’t “get” how words are put together, but you can’t put your finger on the missing piece…
But I know you don’t have time to go digging for lists of prefixes, suffixes, roots/bases, and multiple meaning words.
So I’ve done the grunt-work for you and put them in to the toolkit just for you.
Here’s what’s inside the Word Study Toolkit:
✅Over 200 flashcards with prefixes, root/base words, suffixes, and multiple meaning words to build strong reading and spelling skills.
✅Word lists with key orthographic concepts, so you have a quick guide to important word parts needed for strong vocabulary skills.
✅Descriptions of 17 key concepts for building morphology/orthography skills
✅All flashcards and word lists have definitions, so your students actually remember how words are spelled.
✅BONUS: Video tutorials with a quick-guide for using the toolkit to build reading and spelling skills.
>>>Take a peek at what’s inside the toolkit here.
References:
Champion, T. B. (1997). Tell me somethin’ good: A description of narrative structures among African American children. Linguistics and Education, 9, 251–286 doi: 10.1016/S0898-5898(97)90002-4
