Academically Underprepared Writing Students and Morphological Awareness Instruction: An Intervention Study

• In Event: Lifelong Learning From Adult Secondary to Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Evidence is beginning to show that morphological awareness - the ability to attend to the meaningful sub-parts of words (roots, suffixes, and prefixes) - may have the potential to help students improve their academic writing skills. To advance this evidence, a morphological awareness-based curriculum intervention was designed to help academically underprepared community college students develop the academic writing skills needed for postsecondary success. Effects on students’ writing achievement were measured by a pre- and post- sentence-combining task, and qualitative interviews were conducted. Preliminary results indicate that the intervention was effective, especially in helping academically underprepared writing students develop a better command of sentence and grammatical structures and in empowering them as academic writers.

Author

• Sasha Lotas, University of Washington