Research to Support Bug Club Morphology
Bug Club Morphology follows a research-based scope and sequence. To develop it, Pearson worked with Dr. Kristy Dunn of the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education.
While there is no universally accepted order in which morphemes should be taught, the creation of the scope and sequence for Bug Club Morphology was guided by current research, particularly the work of Manyak, Baumann, and Manyak (2018) in Morphological Analysis Instruction in the Elementary Grades: Which Morphemes to Teach and How to Teach Them. In addition, we consulted the Principles of Instruction for Morphology provided by Louisa Cook Moats in Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (Brookes Publishing, 2020). Moats discusses three basic principles for deciding on the order in which to teach morphemes: the degree of transparency, generativity (the frequency of words with a particular morpheme), and complexity.
With these factors in mind—and the consideration of age-appropriate content based on the vocabulary generated by the morphemes—the scope and sequence was created for Bug Club Morphology.
The research also demonstrates that morphology instruction is more effective when it is combined with other literacy instruction (Bowers, Kirby, and Deacon, 2010) rather than taught in isolation. Moats (2020) describes the design of an explicit morphology instruction: “In an explicitly taught lesson, the teacher will consciously link all language modalities—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—and will use both deductive and inductive methods to promote discovery of word structure and meaning.” Bug Club Morphology kits were intentionally created to connect all strands of language learning to ensure optimal learning. The intentional teaching of morphology leads not only to improved word recognition, but also to improved reading comprehension, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, and spelling (encoding) skills (Berninger et al., 2010; Deacon et al., 2014; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Nagy et al., 2006).