| Tóm tắt: | <p>Over the course of my teaching career, I have observed that in order to excel in English, the ability to expressively use a nuanced and wide vocabulary is fundamental. However, in my experience, many students’ expressive vocabulary knowledge is lacking, meaning that they cannot express themselves in writing with precision, or critique literature with the flair and nuance expected to access higher attainment scores and grades. Students’ work often relies on the use of the same turns of phrases or repeated sentence stems which have been taught as scaffolds and thus when writing, these stock phrases limit the students’ ability to creatively express themselves or their literary interpretations. In order to address this, my research explores the use of morphology as a means to unlock access to a wider range of vocabulary for students to use in their writing and to improve their knowledge of the way morphological components work in order to foster ‘word consciousness’ (Graves, 2016). Carlisle et al (2010) maintain that there has been a ‘growing interest in the role of morphological awareness in literacy acquisition’ (p. 464) but at the same time it is clear that the role that vocabulary, and I would argue specifically knowledge of the morphological components of English plays in the quality of students’ written compositions has received little attention particularly in the secondary school context (Olinghouse & Wilson, 2013).</p>
<p>To address this, my research consisted of an intervention of one lesson per week for all Key Stage 3 students. Each lesson focused on the use of either affixes or roots which were linked by a common theme. To assess the impact of the intervention, I used pre-intervention summative assessments which were compared with post intervention summatively assessed work. Additionally, I used online questionnaires to gather qualitative data about the intervention from students and staff. Overall, the intervention was designed to ‘heighten students’ awareness of the morphological structure of words’ (Carlisle, McBride-Chang, Nagy, & Nunes, 2010, p. 478) in order to determine whether this can have a significant impact on writing performance.</p>
<p>The results of the intervention were mixed and superficially did not have the impact I had hoped in terms of an improvement in the summative assessment data. Despite this, the general attitude from the students towards the intervention was positive and succeeded to a certain degree in terms of raising ‘word consciousness’ and a general interest in morphology. I recognise that there is still more to do in this area of research and would advise a longitudinal approach to a study of the link between morphological awareness and its impact on writing in the future.</p>
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