Control of Morphological Forms During Writing Predicts Essay Quality

• In Event: Innovative Approaches to Integrating Morphology Within Adolescent Literacy Instruction

Abstract

Objectives or Purpose

The present study investigated the extent to which morphological awareness is related to student writing outcomes, specifically essay quality.

Theoretical Framework

Emerging research suggests that morphological awareness may be related to writing skills beyond the well-documented links to spelling. Berninger, Nagy, and Beers (2011) found that morphological awareness explained unique variance in a sentence-combining task with first grade students. Similarly, McCutchen (2011) documented that performance on a morphological awareness task uniquely predicted fifth-grade students’ success using morphological forms in a sentence-combining task that specifically invited morphological changes, and McCutchen, Stull, Herrera, Lotas and Evans (in press) found that morphological instruction improved fifth-grade students’ performance on a sentence-combining task and other short writing tasks. However, questions remain as to whether control of derivational morphemes in such sentence combining tasks predicts quality in longer, more authentic writing tasks.

Methods & Data Sources

Data were gathered from 149 fifth and eighth grade students for use in a regression analysis. Four predictive measures of writing were included: Writing Fluency (from Woodcock Johnson III); Spelling (from the WIAT III); Standardized Sentence Combining (from the WIAT III); Morphological Sentence Combining (an experimenter-designed sentence-combining task developed to test children’s use of derivational morphology).

As the outcome measure, students wrote a ten-minute essay drawn from the WIAT III, on the topic “Write about your favorite game and include at least three reasons why you like it.” The standardized scoring of essays yielded a content and organization score, which was considered the measure best reflecting overall writing quality.

Results

A regression analysis indicated that writing fluency had a unique positive effect on essay quality (b=.88, SE=.38), t(136) = 2.30, p < .05, sr2 = .02 (effect size). Total morphological changes made in the experimenter-developed sentence-combining task also had a unique positive effect on essay quality (b = .80, SE = .39), t(136) = 2.09, p < .05, sr2 =.02. Neither spelling nor the standardized sentence combining measure accounted for unique variance in essay quality.

Scholarly Significance

The results of the study suggest that skill in deriving complex morphological forms uniquely predicts variance in essay quality above other measures of text generation and transcription (writing fluency and spelling). Control over morphological forms at the word level seems to assist writers as they work to generate the conceptually dense and syntactically complex language that characterizes academic writing, and may contribute to writers’ ability to organize ideas at the text level. Producing a well-organized opinion essay clearly requires more than skills in morphologically changing words, but such skill may provide tools with which the writer can signal relationships across sentences and ideas, foreground some ideas while backgrounding others, and maintain conceptual coherence across larger text units.

Authors

• Mary Northey

• Deborah E. Mccutchen, University of Washington

• Elizabeth A. Sanders, University of Washington