Breaking Down Words to Build Meaning

Breaking Down Words to Build Meaning: Morphology, Vocabulary, and Reading Comprehension in the Urban Classroom by Michael J. Kieffer, Nonie K. Lesaux (2007)

New Words
-She writes under a pseudonym.
-The film resonates with a lot of kids.
-He overlooked an important detail.
-Parents play a crucial role in preparing their child for school.
-The two colleges have a reciprocal arrangement whereby students from one college can attend classes at the other.
-The book shows only a superficial understanding of the historical context.
-There is a direct correlation between exposure to sun and skin cancer.
-The school’s approach must be complementary to that of the parents.
-The word morphology can be broken down into two meaning parts known as morphemes.
-She has the daunting task of cooking for 20 people every day.
-Can anyone decipher his handwriting?
-The city is dissected into two areas by a network of old canals.
-It is impossible to say at what point along the continuum a dialect becomes a separate language.
-A cloze test is a type of test in which you have to put suitable words in spaces in a text where words have been left out.

Summary
There is a relationship between vocabulary and reading. Vague notion of a word could lead to misunderstanding of comprehension. It is useful for students to know the way of breaking the complex words down into morphems; bound, unbound (root word), inflection and derivational morphems. The degree of difficulty depends on whether the words are required spelling and sound changes or included less frequent root words. The correlation among roots and affixes may be useful as “a component of knowing a word well and a strategy for learning new words”.

My Idea
The knowledge of breaking down is difficult for the beginners, but it is useful for the advanced learners. It causes the improvement of vocabulary and reading/writing comprehension as well. And knowing the roots from Latin and Greek may be interesting for students. They can know English has been influenced by other languages.

Useful Links
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=253
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=880