A teacher asked Timothy Shanahan a very reasonable question: Is there a grade-level list of morphemes to teach in K–5, something like the Fry sight word list but for morphology?
That question makes perfect sense inside the instructional frame most teachers have been handed. We have lists for everything. We have sight word lists, phonics scopes and sequences, spelling lists, high-frequency word lists, vocabulary lists, and curriculum pacing guides. So once educators start hearing that morphology is important, the natural next question becomes, “Where is the list?”
If we hand teachers a list of morphemes, many of those morphemes will almost certainly get drilled. That is what programs have trained people to do for years. Drill the letters. Drill the sounds. Drill the sight words. Drill the spelling patterns. Drill the prefixes and suffixes. Then drill them again, because repetition is supposed to make learning stick and behaviorist methods took over education long ago.
But for many children, it does not stick. Dyslexic students, language-disordered students, and the children who end up in my practice have usually had plenty of repetition. They have had more repetition than anyone else in the room. The problem is not that they have not been drilled enough. The problem is that rote memorization and sound-first instruction do not give them access to the logic of the system.
That is why Shanahan’s answer is significant. He said he did not know of such a list, and then he brought in the work of Jeffrey and Peter Bowers. Pete’s answer did not lead to a morpheme checklist. It did not say, “Teach these morphemes in kindergarten, these in first grade, and these in second.” It pointed away from disconnected morphemes and toward word families, word sums, matrices, suffixing conventions, the structure-and-meaning test, etymology, and grapheme-phoneme correspondences understood within morphological families.
That is a huge shift!
It is not just a shift away from one kind of list. It is a shift away from the idea that literacy instruction should be built from disconnected units that children memorize through repetition. A morpheme list might look more advanced than a phonics list, but if it is used the same way, it reproduces the same problem. Children still get fragments instead of a system.
People who have been practicing Structured Word Inquiry have known for more than a decade that graphemes live in morphemes. That is my framing of it: the morpheme is the natural habitat of the grapheme. A grapheme is not floating around in space waiting to be matched to a sound. It is working inside a morpheme, and the morpheme is carrying meaning and often history.
This is not a small technical point. You have to identify the morpheme before you can accurately identify the graphemes. If you do not, you run the risk of inventing false graphemes. You start treating letters as if they belong together when they are actually sitting in different morphemes. You create extra units for children to memorize, and the last thing struggling learners need is more artificial units piled onto an already overloaded system.
This is one of the major failures of phonics-first instruction. It asks children to look at spelling through sound before they have been given access to the meaning-bearing structure that organizes the spelling. Then, when the sound-first explanation breaks down, the child is blamed for not remembering the pattern, not practicing enough, not blending well enough, or not having enough phonemic awareness.
But the system was never organized around sound alone.
English spelling prioritizes meaning. It preserves relationships among words even when pronunciation shifts. The spelling of a base often remains stable across a family, even when that base is pronounced differently in different words. This is why grapheme-phoneme correspondences have to be studied inside morphological families. Phonology is important and grapheme-phoneme correspondences are a part of phonology. But they do not make full sense when they are severed from morphology and etymology. Spelling-meaning correspondences must be understood before we can identify the graphemes.
That is why this answer is much bigger than the original question.
The teacher asked for a K–5 morpheme list. The response pointed toward Structured Word Inquiry. It pointed toward the interrelationship of morphology, etymology, and phonology. It pointed toward classroom videos of children doing this work. It pointed toward the very framework many of us have been arguing for while the field insisted that children first needed more phonics, more practice, more repetition, and more drill.
And yes, it is huge to see Timothy Shanahan publish this.
He may not be saying it in the blunt way I would say it. He may not be saying, “SWI was right all along.” But he is saying out loud something SWI practitioners have known and demonstrated for years: children need to understand grapheme-phoneme correspondences from within morphological families. That statement changes the frame. It moves the conversation away from phonics first with morphology added later and toward the writing system as it actually works.
For years, SWI has been treated by many people as if it were peripheral, theoretical, too advanced for young children, or merely “morphology added onto phonics.” That framing has never been accurate. SWI is not phonics with morphemes sprinkled on top. It is not a vocabulary activity. It is not enrichment for older students who have already learned to read. It is a way of teaching children how English orthography works.
The classroom videos are part of the significance here because they push back against one of the most common dismissals of SWI. People often talk as if children cannot do this work, as if word sums, matrices, etymology, and structural analysis are adult abstractions that belong in professional development but not in classrooms. But children can investigate words. They can build families. They can test hypotheses. They can learn suffixing conventions as tools for analysis. They can study phonology more accurately when the graphemes are located inside meaningful structure.
This does not mean there is no scope. It means the scope is not a list of morphemes to march through by grade level. The scope is conceptual. Children need to learn that every word is either a base or a base with something else. They need to learn that bases and affixes are meaningful building blocks. They need to learn that word sums are tools for analysis. They need to learn that matrices show relationships within a family. They need to learn that suffixing conventions help us test structural hypotheses. They need to learn that spelling preserves meaning and history, even when pronunciation changes.
And yes, they need to learn phonology. They need to learn grapheme-phoneme correspondences. But they need to learn them accurately, which means they need to learn them inside real words, real families, and real structure. Phonology is part of orthography. Phonics, as it is usually taught, is an instructional frame that isolates phonology from the very structures that make it understandable.
This is why SWI has always been a threat to the usual reading conversation. It does not simply say, “Add morphology.” It says the frame is wrong. It says children should not have to wait until they have survived years of isolated phonics instruction before they are allowed to study meaning, structure, and history. It says the writing system is coherent now, not later.
A grade-level morpheme list sounds helpful because it feels organized. It gives teachers something concrete. It offers the comfort of sequence and coverage. But if the list separates morphemes from word families, structure, etymology, grammar, and phonology, then it recreates the same problem we already have in literacy instruction. We hand children fragments and then wonder why they do not understand the system.
SWI asks different questions. What words are children already using, reading, writing, and wondering about? What bases are present in those words? What families can we build? What structure can we test with word sums? What can a matrix help us see? What does the history of the word explain? What phonology becomes clearer once the morphology and etymology are understood?
Those questions lead to teaching that is organized, but not scripted around disconnected units. They lead to repetition, but not drill. The repetition comes from returning to meaningful structures across word families, texts, sentences, and writing. It comes from seeing the same base carry meaning across related words. It comes from testing hypotheses again and again in real language.
That kind of repetition builds understanding because it is connected to meaning.
For those of us who have been teaching this way for years, this is not new. We have seen children use word sums. We have seen young students understand matrices. We have seen struggling readers and spellers make sense of words when they are allowed to study meaning and structure instead of being pushed through another round of sound drills. We have seen that SWI is not too advanced for children. It is often the first approach that finally treats them as thinkers and allows them to be successful.
So yes, this shift is enormous. Not because one article solves the larger problem in literacy instruction, and not because Shanahan has suddenly said everything exactly the way I would say it. It is enormous because the frame is moving. The question began with a request for a list, and the answer pointed toward the system SWI has been teaching.
