Teacher Discussion Forums

I teach a few languages and find that, in some, the best way to teach the language is entirely through the roots. Students love it, as they can then apply their knowledge of roots to create innumerable words, and recognise new words without even being taught them; it allows for exponential growth of vocabulary.

With English, on the other hand, it would seem that roots might be more of a trap than a help. The word 'cord' has nothing to do with the root 'cord' in cordial, etc. And roots cannot be randomly put together according to logical reasoning, such as concluding that if we can say drunkenness, we can also say soberness (what about sobriety leading to drunkity?).

I'd been experimenting with roots this semester, and the results have been mixed. On the one hand, it does seem to have resulted in a rapid expansion in my students' passive reading ability. But on the other it has also led to frustration on the part of students who, initially excited by this new discovery, are now being told that they can't use this root with that one, and that root with this one, etc. They keep falling into traps at every turn, not to mention, as in the case of 'cord' above, assuming that all words with the same apparent root must necessarily be the same root.

It seems that now I'm having to 'unteach' most of what I've taught, bringing me back to square one.

I'm certainly thankful for my students' ability to understand so much passive reading at such an early stage as compared to my students before. But at least my other students, though their reading ability grew much more slowly, knew how to use each word properly (which would make sense seeing that I'd taught those students words only, rather than going with roots and then trying to build into words.

Has anyone here got advice on how to approach the labyrinth of roots in English, or is it better to just to not teach them at all (they do seem chaotic overall , so sometimes I doubt that they actually save any time in the long run anyway unless the students' mother tongue is a European one).

Any advice would be much appreciated.

I've long harboured suspicions about this area, which seem more founded than ever, in light of your experience. Certainly, 'processes of derivation by affixation' (the flip side of the roots coin) seems to me a tacit admission of defeat - the argument is always that there is never enough time to study all the necessary vocabulary on an item by item basis - but that is probably exactly what is needed if we are to avoid the pitfalls that you mention. At the very least, students should be given a list such as in the back of the Cambridge advanced learner dictionary, so that they can concentrate on the highest frequency stuff; more ambitious teachers should be trying to compile lists that show exactly how productive particular affixes are (or aren't), and where there are either not that many words (e.g. "following on from" the prefix 'a'), or too many to really enumerate ('un...'), it would probably be best to ignore them. Generally, I think students will come to surer conclusions through general study and informal recognition of the internal composition of discrete items they have actually studied in some depth/context.

By the way, I posted something quite a while ago about an online affix flashcard thingy - try searching for it (gotta dash).

Thanks for the comments.

While I was aware that my experiment could fall apart, I tried it anyway partially due to pressure from the school to get me to teach my English students as quickly as I do those for my other languages.

I'd tried to explain that English is just more difficult, but the accusation was that I'm playing favourites with my other students and giving them more of my time (just the opposite is true!). I'd tried to explain the shortcuts I was taking with the other languages, and so the headmaster insisted I take the same shortcuts with English. I'd told him it could be difficult, but heck, I'd tried it anyway. Read the results!

I guess each language has its own unique teaching methods and convenient shortcuts that simply cannot be reproduced with other languages. All I can say is that when I can just teach roots in one language, teaching words in the other then just seems so inefficient, tedious and slow in comparison. I guess that's just something the teacher has to accept when teaching other languages, and not expect the same results for different languages.

I've learnt my lesson. Patience is just a virtue I'll have to work on with my English students.

I must emphasize, though, that this group's passive reading knowledge has certainly moved along at a much faster pace than any of my groups previously. It's just their active use of the language that seems to have suffered as a result, at least in this short term that I've had the chance to witness. My past studetns had moved much more quickly in their active knowledge due to their learning how to use each word correctly. Just that their passive knowledge was limited and they seemd to have to learn each word one by one.

Trade off, I guess? Passive vs. active?

Ah, that patience.

Awareness of roots and morphology can certainly help students work out the meanings of new words. It helps a lot of they know about affixes like pre-, -ness and so on.

It's less useful for production as a lot of this stuff can't be generalised across the board.

Edit: I see Fluff appears to have invented the word Googleable on another thread. Although I'd never seen it before, my knowledge of morphology was how I worked out what he meant.

I must emphasize, though, that this group's passive reading knowledge has certainly moved along at a much faster pace than any of my groups previously. It's just their active use of the language that seems to have suffered as a result, at least in this short term that I've had the chance to witness.

I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. With inconsistencies, just have students learn what the inconsistencies are; they have to learn them anyhow, just as well make it meaningful. You are experimenting with this now. If you do it a while, you'll learn better how to efficiently teach this method and how to present the inconsistencies to students before they are confounded by them.