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A great activity to do at home to help support language structure is to write out chores on a white board and next to each chore offer a different chore as an alternative. this way students can pick a "this or that" option and are still productively doing their chores. This gives them a voice and option in what they want to do but allows them to understand comparisons, superlatives and phrasal verbs.

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Family and Caregiver Activities

"I just want to enjoy being with my granddaughter at home. How can I make learning fun for her?" -Grandfather of a young English learner in California

Learning together can be fun! These family and caregiver activities ( FCAs) are designed to provide simple, fun activities families and caregivers can use with young English learner children at home to leverage cultural and linguistic assets and knowledge to strengthen language development in either the home language or English. The resources are based on the What Works Clearinghouse practice guide " Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School." They are available in multiple languages.

Educator Resources

These resources support educators in helping families and caregivers make the most of the activities:

TOOL: Educators' Guide
Read the Educators' Guide to learn more about the activities as well as tips to help families and caregivers make the most out of the them.

VIDEO: Introductory Webinar
Watch a webinar that introduces the research behind the activities and provides suggestions to maximize learning and fun while families, caregivers, and children engage with the FCAs.

VIDEO COLLECTION: Activities in Action
See educators and families in action! View three videos that connect classroom instruction with use of the family and caregiver activities at home.

Activities

Download all activities in:

Questions about Informational Text

Ask and answer questions about an informational text.

Video Collection

Video 1: Building Oral and Written Language Skills

This video shows how to extend elementary classroom learning to the home with two Family and Caregiver Activity sheets: Asking and Answering Questions About an Informational Text and Writing Notebooks. The simple and fun activities, using content from classroom lessons, encourage young English learners to strengthen oral and written language skills while interacting with family members or caregivers.

Video 2: Supporting Young English Learners to Develop Academic Vocabulary Across Content Areas

This video demonstrates how educators, families, and caregivers partnered to prepare transitional kindergarten children for classroom lessons on sequential language across content areas and then extend this learning using two fun and engaging activity sheets: Asking and Answering Questions About a Story and Making a Meal Together.

Video 3: Applying Academic Vocabulary and Language to Multiple Contexts

This video focuses on how the Family and Caregiver Activity sheets Word Detective and Interviewing a Special Person can extend classroom lessons on academic vocabulary and language to help elementary-age English learner students use new words across multiple contexts by listening, speaking, writing, and drawing with their family members and caregivers.

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educational improvement; excellence in education; educational research; statistics; statistical data; statistical surveys; regional educational laboratory program; rel; rigorous studies; fast response projects; no child left behind

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REL Resource | Supporting Young English Learners at Home

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Learning together can be fun! These family and caregiver activities (FCAs) are designed to provide simple, fun activities families and caregivers can use with young English learner children at home to leverage cultural and linguistic assets and knowledge...

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Addressing ELL Proficiency at home (for guardians)

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Addressing ELL Proficiency at home (for guardians)

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This at home activity addresses the various language proficiencies of ELLs because the chores can be read to them so they have assistance with word pronunciation. They also can identify morphemes of words on the choice board and it allows multiple options (which is more to read) but is more engaging to the child since they will do what they prefer. (Not realizing they are reading more when they are provided with options)

They can also sort the chores into two columns with a venn diagram to identify chores the like or "dis- like", or don't mind to do either. This helps the child use phonology and morphology as well as engage the child and give choice with "at home" chores.

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Morpheme game
Put parts of a words into a hat and have students pick from the hat each word part. Allow for all students to make a word if they are partnered correctly (for an example a student may pick "-dis" another student may pick "-engage" and another student may pick "-ment".) Have the student write down the definition of their morpheme (word part) then have students go around the room to try to make a word that makes sense. They may partner up in a pair of two or three depending on how many morphemes the word has.

To differentiate this for EL students having a reference guide is helpful. To see which morphemes mean which definitions. (i.e -"dis" = not or no) This way they can understand their morphemes as well as others when trying to form a full word with their classmates.

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Building Blocks
Have students build large blocks that link together and write a prefix, suffix and root words on each block. Then have the student put the blocks together to make real words.

Example:
En-, content, -ful, dis-, light, joy, de-, -ment

Possible words to make: contentment, discontent, delightful, joyful, enjoy

This can be differentiated for EL students if the teacher can incorporates flashcards with the blocks to use as a word bank to make words. This helps students so they can see the words on the flash cards and take apart the words with the blocks to make each morpheme.

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Fix the Prefixes and Suffixes
Teach the class the concept of affixes by explaining prefixes (parts added to the beginning) and suffixes (part added to the end). Create a list of root words and a corresponding list of affixes, encourage students to match the root with the correct prefix of suffix

Example:

Hope -ed

Base - ful

Tempt -ment

This can be differentiated for EL students by having simple root words to start and then scaffold harder root words. A great way to do this would be in partners or small group so the students aren't doing this alone and have the assistance from peers.

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Word games

Scrabble

Pictionary

Charades

This supports development of language structure because it provides fun ways to write words and match them to spoken words. It also helps identify word meaning within the games and how to spell/read the words.

How to differentiate these games for ELL students

Scrabble

Use word banks for spelling assistance

Pictionary

Have the word they need to draw be spoken to them via technology or whispered from the teacher

Charades

Have the student choose the word themselves, rather than a list of words the student many have difficult reading.

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Daily Riddles
This helps language structure because it is a fun way to use words in relation to ideas or imagining scenes or imaginary situations. The teacher should read or say the riddles aloud and clarify if there is any misunderstandings. (i.e - school of fish is just a group of fish.) This will help them understand the riddle better.

This can be differentiated for EL students by providing clues since riddles can have a cultural undertone it is important to leave those riddles out and chose basic mainstream riddles all students can understand.
Start with more simple riddles and have them available as an audio read via online platform (google classroom) then students can have it read to them as many times as they need.

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Songs

Songs in the classroom help students learn new words and allow students a sense of rhythm and rhyme so the words stick and they can sing along. This enhances engagement and allow for more fun games along with the song for future lessons.

A way to modify this for EL students is to allow every day access to the songs. I would post this to an online platform (such as google classroom) where they have access at home and at school. This way they can listen to the songs as many times as they enjoy.

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Tongue Twisters

Tongue twisters help students pronounce words correctly and understand enunciation of words. They can train their tongue to pronounce words or phrases.

This may be a challenge for some students but with practice they will get better.

A way to differentiate this for EL students is to start with simple tongue twisters that you can associate pictures with. An example would be "Shelly sells sea shells at the sea shore". The teacher would display a picture of shelly selling sea shells on the shore of a beach. This helps the student visualize what the tongue twisters meaning is.

It is a fun way to train their tongue to pronounce words. Start with simple ones and work your way up.

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Morphology has the ability to transfer concepts across content or subject areas and draw significant connections between vocabulary words belonging to the same family.

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English has the most words of any language and estimates range from 600,000 to more than one million words. English is derived from many languages, including Old Norse (the root of German, Dutch, Nordic languages, and English), French, Latin, and Greek, and other borrowed words from many other languages. All of this "borrowing" makes learning how to speak, read and write English quite challenging.

Parents, teachers, and reading specialists have long understood the power of phonics for young readers-in more technical terms: 'phonemic' and 'phonological' awareness builds on children's understanding of the individual sounds in words and the ability to manipulate them and larger units of sounds, including syllables.￼￼ Morphological awareness is also a key part of student development. A 'morpheme,' is the smallest meaningful unit of language that cannot be further subdivided.

Most educators are aware of the concept of morphology but do not receive adequate training to help their students recognize base words and patterns early on in literacy acquisition. Morphology teaches students how to unlock other related words <see example below> and broaden their overall vocabulary. It is also a bridge to other Latin-based languages. Students understand and use basic morphological knowledge as early as kindergarten and first grade.

In 2017, research by J. Kirby and P. Bowers, on Morphological Instruction and Literacy made the case for morphology being the one linguistic feature that links directly to orthographic patterns, pronunciation, and meanings of words. According to this view, better morphological knowledge gained through explicit instruction can be expected to increase not only morphological knowledge but also grapheme-phoneme and semantic (vocabulary) knowledge. This theory provides a way of understanding the literacy gains observed from early morphological instruction.

P. Bowers and J. Kirby identify nine key features of morphological instruction:

Integrate morphology with other aspects of literacy instruction.

Extend morphological instruction to include etymology.

Integrate morphological instruction with subject area learning.

Employ an inquiry-based problem-solving approach.

Target free and bound bases as well as affixes.

Teach morphological families using a matrix, rather than isolated morphemes.

Target instruction to reduce the effect that phonological and spelling shifts (suffixing changes) across morphologically related words have on reading and spelling.

While most states publish academic standards that require students to analyze the morphemes to determine word meaning, there is inconsistency between academic standards and teacher training. Morphology should be taught within the context of vocabulary instruction as a strategy for understanding the relationships among words based on their shared meaningful units - i.e., their bases, prefixes, and suffixes. For example, root and base words are two different concepts. A root refers to the original word such as the Latin root word 'placere'. Bases (either bound or free) are the morphemes derived from the original root. is the base that derived from the Latin root 'placere'.

Seeking root relationships in words helps develop curious learners. Over time, students begin to understand that most words are structured according to logical patterns of meaning and spelling. Consider that the 20 most common make up 97% of all prefixed words and the 14 most frequently used word roots provide clues to the meaning of over 100,000 words. The correlations between morphological awareness and success in reading, writing, and spelling are strong.

Whether a student is taking a science, math, or history class, morphology helps learners, including English language learners, make important connections among vocabulary words within the same , and transfer those ideas across content or subject areas.

For more information on Morphology training, please visit https://imse.com/training-descriptions/
Please connect with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest to get tips and tricks from your peers and IMSE. Read the IMSE Journal to hear success stories from other schools and districts, and be sure to read the OG Weekly email series for refreshers and tips.

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Morphology and How It Helps with Vocabulary - IMSE - Journal

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English has the most words of any language and estimates range from 600,000 to more than one million words. English is derived from many languages, including Old Norse (the root of German, Dutch, Nordic languages, and English), French, Latin, and Greek, and other borrowed words from many other languages.

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Reading requires phonological awareness (or phonology), as written words match to spoken words. To go from a printed to a spoken word (reading) or from a spoken to a written word (spelling), readers must be aware of the speech sounds that letters and letter combinations represent. (Moats, 2010).

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Finding Roots Kahoot
Students will join a digital kahoot (if they are one to one devices) and can go through the kahoot quiz after a lesson on root words. Students can practice identifying root words with a list of words for each question and use multiple choice to pick the correct root words for each suffix, prefix or affix.

Example words: hopeful, sleeping, carefully, powerfully, enjoyment

This can be adjusted for EL students to allow them to have the text on their kahoot screen read to them so they don't have to read the words themselves.

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Phonology definition: Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages.

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What is Phonology?

Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages. Put more formally, phonology is the study of the categorical organisation of speech sounds in languages; how speech sounds are organised in the mind and used to convey meaning. In this section of the website, we will describe the most common phonological processes and introduce the concepts of underlying representations for sounds versus what is actually produced, the surface form.

Phonology can be related to many linguistic disciplines, including psycholinguistics, cognitive science, sociolinguistics and language acquisition. Principles of phonology can also be applied to treatments of speech pathologies and innovations in technology. In terms of speech recognition, systems can be designed to translate spoken data into text. In this way, computers process the language like our brains do. The same processes that occur in the mind of a human when producing and receiving language occur in machines. One example of machines decoding language is the popular intelligence system, Siri.

Phonology vs. Phonetics - the key differences

Phonology is concerned with the abstract, whereas phonetics is concerned with the physical properties of sounds. In phonetics we can see infinite realisations, for example every time you say a 'p' it will slightly different than the other times you've said it. However, in phonology all productions are the same sound within the language's phoneme inventory, therefore even though every 'p' is produced slightly different every time, the actual sound is the same. This highlights a key difference between phonetic and phonology as even though no two 'p's are the same, they represent the same sound in the language.

https://www.slideshare.net/inglesdocencia/phonology-vs-phonetics

Phonology vs phonetics from inglesdocencia

(Phonology vs phonetics from inglesdocencia)

Also refer to the Phonetics page to get a better idea of the differences and similarities between these two related areas of linguistics.

Phonemes V. Allophones

Phonemes are the meaningfully different sound units in a language (the smallest units of sound). For example, 'pat' and 'bat' differ in their first phoneme: the "p" and "b". Vowels are also phonemes, so "pat" and "pet" differ by a phoneme, too (But phonemes don't always match up with spelling!). When two words differ by a single phoneme they are known as a minimal pair.
Allophones are different ways to pronounce a phoneme based on its environment in a word. For example, the two allophones of /l/ in "little" are actually produced slightly differently, and the second one sounds slightly deeper. These different "l"s always occur in different environments in words, which is known as "complementary distribution".

Phonology looks at many different things...

Why do related forms differ? Sane-Sanity. Electric-Electricity/ Atom-Atomic
Phonology finds the systematic ways in which the forms differ and explains them

What is stored in the mind?
Phonology studies abstract mental entities, such as structures and processes. This contrasts with phonetics, which deals with the actual production and acoustics of the sounds of language.

What sounds go together?
Looks at what sounds/sound combinations are accepted and why.

How are sounds organized into syllables?
With the use of phonological trees syllables are broken up more easily. Syllables are made up of a rhyme and an onset (any consonants before the rhyme). The rhyme made up of a nucleus (the vowel sound(s) in the syllable, the key component of all syllables) and a coda (any consonants following the nucleus).

What are the differences between languages?
For example, different languages can used different phonemes, or different syllable structures (what sounds can go together to make sequences or words) and phonology identifies these differences.

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Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages. Put more formally, phonology is the study of the categorical organisation of speech sounds in languages; how speech sounds are organised in the mind and used to convey meaning.

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Identify words that rhyme

Counting the number of syllables in a name Recognizing alliteration

Segmenting a sentence into words

Identifying the syllables in a word.

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Morphology definition: Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and forms a core part of linguistic study today. The term morphology is Greek and is a makeup of morph- meaning 'shape, form', and -ology which means 'the study of something'.

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Morphology - the internal structure of words

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and forms a core part of linguistic study today.

The term morphology is Greek and is a makeup of morph- meaning 'shape, form', and -ology which means 'the study of something'.

Morphology as a sub-discipline of linguistics was named for the first time in 1859 by the German linguist August Schleicher who used the term for the study of the form of words.[1]

What is a word?

Smallest independent units of language

Independent:

1. do not depend on other words.

2. can be separated from other units

3. can change position.[2]

Example:

The man looked at the horse s.

s is the plural marker, dependent on the noun horse to receive meaning

Horses is a word: can occur in other positions or stand on its own

EG:
The horses looked at the man.
- What is the man looking at? - Horses.

Words are thus both independent since they can be separated from other words and move around in sentences, and the smallest units of language since they are the only units of language for which this is possible.

Morphemes - the building blocks of morphology

Words have internal structure built of even smaller pieces

1. SIMPLE WORDS: Don't have internal structure (only consist of one morpheme) e.g., work, build, run. They can't be split into smaller parts which carry meaning or function.

2. COMPLEX WORDS: Have internal structure (consist of two or more morphemes) e.g., worker: affix -er added to the root work to form a noun.

Morphemes are the smallest meaning-bearing units of language.[3]
FREE VS BOUND MORPHEMES

Free morpheme: a simple word, consisting of one morpheme e.g., house, work, high, chair, wrap. They are words in themselves.

Bound morpheme: morphemes that must be attached to another morpheme to receive meaning.

EG: UNKIND NESS

UN- and -NESS are the bound morphemes, requiring the root KIND to form the word.

These are also called affixes as they are attached to the stem. There are two types as outlined below:

1. Prefix (front of the base) = Un-

2. Suffix (end of the base) = -ness

Drawing Morphology Trees

Below is a step-by-step guide to drawing a morphology tree:

Morphology trees show the internal structure of a word.

Examples:
https://youtu.be/wIsg-ulSCnk
References

[1] Booij, G. E., (2007). The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[2] Fasold, R. and Connor-Linton, J., (2006). An Introduction to Language and Linguistics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
[3] O'Grady, W., (1997). Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. London: Longman
[4] McGregor, W., (2009). Linguistics: An Introduction. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

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Morphology - the internal structure of words Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and forms a core part of linguistic study today. The term morphology is Greek and is a makeup of morph- meaning 'shape, form', and -ology which means 'the study of something'.

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Dis + please = Displease
Please + ing = Pleasing
Un + Please + ed = Unpleased
Please + ure = Pleasure