The Facilitative Role of Morphology Skills in Producing Written Texts for Middle-Grade Writers

• In Event: Mapping Morphology and Its Multidimensionality, Assessment, Relations to Outcomes, and Relation to Covariates

Abstract

Purpose:
We examine under-explored relations between derivational morphology skills and two aspects of middle graders’ written summaries (quality and use of academic vocabulary).

Theoretical Framework:
When writing academic summaries a challenge faced by middle grade writers (~ages 9-14) is marshaling the language to precisely and concisely express the source text’s conceptually-dense information. Writers who bring developed morphology skills, or knowledge of how to derive new words from familiar ones (e.g., to investigate
->investigation) or condense phrases (members of the communist party-> communists), may have available to them a larger set of language resources to express themselves in writing. This may result in the production of higher quality texts that are more lexically sophisticated (McCutchen & Stull, 2015; Saddler & Graham, 2005). Here, we focus on relations between morphological skills and students’ performances in written summaries, rather than in short, constrained tasks used in prior studies (e.g., sentence combining).

Methods:
951 consented students from 99 classrooms (13.6% special education eligible; 9.5% English Learner; 81% free and reduced-price-lunch eligible; 53.6% female; Grade 4=24%; 5=31%; 6=25%; 7=20%) were administered two measures by research assistants:
1)Global Integrated Scenario-Based Assessment or GISA (Sabatini, O’Reilly, Halderman, & Bruce, 2014): a vertically-equated computer-based scenario-based assessment of reading comprehension that involves reading a series of informational texts and producing written summaries.
2)Morphological Decomposition Task (adapted from Carlisle, 1988 and Kieffer, 2009): short-response task that requires students to decompose a morphologically-complex word into a simpler form that shares the same root to complete a sentence [driver. Children are too young to (drive)]. Items were read aloud to students.

Data:
Table 1 contains sample descriptives. Students’ summaries were scored by raters using a 6-point holistic quality rubric (adapted from NAEP, 2011). Using the program TAALES (Kyle et al., 2018), which provides automated measures of lexical sophistication, the percentage of words found on the Academic Word List (AWL) was estimated for each summary. The AWL identifies the 570 most common word families in academic articles and textbooks (e.g., analyze, theory, and transmit) (Coxhead, 2000).

Results:
Multilevel regression analysis was conducted to account for classroom clusters.

Results of Model 1A-B revealed that, on average, students with higher levels of derivational morphology knowledge produced summaries of higher quality when controlling for summary and writer characteristics (i.e., number of words, reading comprehension scores for the summarized passage, learner socio-demographics) (Table 2).

Model 2 examined the prediction of students’ use of words from the AWL in their written summaries. Despite the modest use of academic words in students’ summaries (~6%), results revealed that, on average, students with higher levels of derivational morphology knowledge produced summaries containing greater numbers of words from the AWL (Table 3).

Significance:
As hypothesized, morphology skills played a facilitative role in students’ production of high-quality written summaries and to be predictive of their use of academic words in these summaries. Notably, students in the sample used very few words from AWL, potentially highlighting the utility of morphology instruction as a support for developing writers.

Authors

• Emily Phillips Galloway, Vanderbilt University

• Paola Uccelli, Harvard University

• Christopher Daniel Barr, University of Houston