The Impact of Teaching Morphological Rules in Writing

This study investigates how teaching morphological rules contributes to the writing of words and pseudo-words. A total of 111 students from the 4^th grade of a public school were assigned to three experimental groups and one control group. The students were submitted to pre- and post-tests (immediate and delayed) in control measures and word discrimination. The intervention addressed the explicit teaching of rules concerning the following morphological elements in Portuguese: "-esa"/"-eza" (derivational morphology), "-am"/"-ão" (inflectional morphology), "-iu"/"-il" (inflectional and derivational morphology). The results show that the intervention had a specific impact on improved performance in the spelling of words, especially pseudo-words, the spelling of which cannot be derived from lexical information. The results corroborate those reported by other studies, confirming the positive and lasting effect of explicitly teaching morphological rules for the spelling of complex words.