Umeå University's logo

An increasing number of Swedish students have difficulties passing the national tests in reading and writing in primary school. It is therefore urgent to develop and evaluate early reading instruction for children at risk of developing reading difficulties. Teaching morphological knowledge has been shown to have a beneficial effect on word reading skills, vocabulary and reading comprehension in previous studies. The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether a short intervention in morphology affects the word reading ability and the morphological awareness of a group of students identified with weak word reading skills. The study used a quasi-experimental, between-group design in the form of an intervention with pre- and post-tests to map the students' ability in word reading and morphological knowledge. In relation to word reading skills, the results showed no effect of the intervention on reading regularly spelled words and pseudo-words, however the intervention showed modest effect sizes on reading irregular words and morphological complex pseudo-words. However, no significant differences were found between the intervention and control group regarding the progress from pre- to post test on any of the word reading tasks. In relation to morphological awareness the intervention showed significant and large effect sizes on inflection skills and modest effect sizes (n.s.) on a subtest combining tasks in inflection and derivation. For the other morphological subtests non-significant and small effect sizes were found. The results should be interpreted with caution due to the low number of participants and the short timeline for the intervention. The study can give special education teachers some more knowledge about how morphological methods can be implemented in a small-group intervention and contribute to developing students’ reading ability.