Innovation in Language Learning

Morphological knowledge has been a favored object of study for the past twenty years in research that focus on literacy development. Morphological knowledge refers to the ability to think about and analyze word structure at the level of morphemes, i.e. roots, prefixes, and suffixes (Kirby & Bowers, 2018). Morphological knowledge has been found to have multidimensional contribution to literacy, namely to word recognition, spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension (Levesque et al., 2021). Since 2010, researchers (e.g., Carlisle, 2010) have recommended to integrate morphological knowledge into the teaching of written language, but such an integration is not automatic. It presupposes the transposition of knowledge from linguistics, psycholinguistics and didactics to propose a morphological teaching program. Moreover, implementing such a program requires teachers' training in morphological knowledge. In this paper, we report on how morphological knowledge teaching has been implemented through the 3 phases of a collaborative research method (Desgagné et al., 1997) in a school in a multiethnic neighborhood. These phases include teacher training on morphological knowledge, the co-elaboration of a morphological program and the experimentation of this program in 7 classrooms over the school year. The discussion of the effects of the program focusses on the winning conditions to be put in place to ensure the expected effects of such implementation.