Morphology helps because it puts meaning back at the centre of the word.

The alternative is to teach words as things that are built. English words have parts — roots, prefixes, suffixes — and those parts carry meaning. ‘Port’ means to carry. Once a child knows that, ‘transport’, ‘import’, ‘export’, ‘portable’ and ‘porter’ stop being five separate things to memorise and become one idea the child already half-knows, showing up in five different words. The word stops being arbitrary. There’s a reason it means what it means, and reasons are easier to remember than arbitrary facts. This is what’s meant by morphology — the study of how words are built from meaningful parts — and etymology, the study of where those parts came from. They’re closely related, and in teaching they work together.

Why this matters more than it might sound

Here’s the figure worth knowing. The large majority of the subject-specific vocabulary children meet at school — the words of science, history, geography, maths — comes from Latin and Greek roots. These are the harder words, the ones that decide whether a child can access a textbook or a GCSE paper. They are also, helpfully, the most regular: classical roots behave predictably, which means a child who understands how they work has a key that fits a great many locks.

So this isn’t a nice extra for word enthusiasts. For a child meeting the demanding vocabulary of secondary school, understanding word structure is one of the more direct routes into the curriculum.

What the research shows

The evidence here is genuinely strong, and it’s strongest exactly where it matters most — for children who find reading and spelling hard. A meta-analysis bringing together seventeen studies of children with literacy difficulties found that teaching morphology improved a whole range of outcomes: vocabulary, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, reading comprehension and spelling. The effects were significant, and the authors noted that morphological instruction was particularly effective for struggling readers and children with learning, language, or reading difficulties (Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). A separate systematic review of twenty-two studies found that the benefit of morphological instruction was larger for less able readers than for stronger ones (Bowers, Kirby & Deacon, 2010).

More recent work has tested this with the children it’s meant to help. A randomised controlled trial ran a full school year of Structured Word Inquiry — an approach that teaches the spelling system explicitly through morphology and etymology — with poor readers and spellers in Years 3 and 5 (Colenbrander et al., 2022). Another trial found Structured Word Inquiry produced medium-to-large improvements in word reading for persistently poor readers, though the researchers were honest that it was no magic fix - some children continued to struggle (Georgiou et al., 2021). And an intervention built specifically for children with dyslexia found that morphological awareness can give them a way to compensate, to a degree, for the phonological difficulties that make reading hard (Mendes & Kirby, 2024). That honesty matters. None of this is a cure. But the direction of the evidence is consistent: teaching children how words are built helps.

What this looked like in practice

I worked with one girl over two years as a dyslexia specialist. She was preparing for the 11 Plus, and I made a deliberate choice to focus on vocabulary through word-building - partly because vocabulary is a component of the exam, but mostly because of the pattern above. She was exactly the learner I had in mind: bright, capable with meaning, but with a vocabulary that had fallen behind while she spent her energy decoding. We practised spellings too, at the end of each session. I’m cautious about spelling with dyslexic learners; it’s the area where pressure does the most harm and the least good. But a multisensory approach to it — seeing, hearing, saying, writing - is, in my experience, worth doing, and gentle enough not to become the thing she dreaded. Her mother charted the spelling tests she sat at school over that period, and the improvement was marked.

And this carries into French and German

Everything so far has been about English. The question I’m asked most by parents of dyslexic children learning a foreign language is whether the same thinking helps there too - when a child is drowning in French or German vocabulary that won’t stick. I want to be straight about the evidence here, because it’s thinner. The strong studies above are about English, about reading, and about children. When we move to foreign-language vocabulary, the research that exists is mostly on adult learners of English as a foreign language — useful, but not the same population. Two reasonable studies found that teaching the etymology of words helped adult language learners remember vocabulary, both immediately and weeks later (Alshatti, 2023; Mahmoudi & Mirionlu, 2020). So the principle holds up where it’s been tested. It just hasn’t been tested directly on dyslexic British children learning French.

What makes me confident it carries across anyway is the structure of the languages themselves. French and German aren’t strangers to English — they’re relatives. A child who knows that ‘port’ means to carry already has a head start on the French ‘porter’, to carry, and on ‘apporter’ and ‘transporter’. German shares a deep common ancestor with English, so ‘Wasser’ and ‘water’, ‘Vater’ and ‘father’, ‘Garten’ and ‘garden’ aren’t coincidences to be memorised separately but cognates. For a child who finds rote memorising punishing, being shown that a French or German word is already half-familiar changes what’s being asked of them.

So the foreign-language application is reasoned rather than proven to the same standard. But it’s well reasoned, and it’s borne out in practice in my own teaching.