Morphemic Awareness

Morphemic, or morphological, awareness, involves explicitly thinking about the smallest units of meaning in language, which are called morphemes. These units include root words that can stand alone as words, prefixes, suffixes, and bound roots, which are roots that must have a prefix or suffix added to become a word. When a reader attempts to read an unknown, word, morphological awareness is a tool that can be used to deduce the meaning of the word. E.g. if they had never seen the written word 'magician', but realised it may be related to magic, they might be more apt to decode the word and assign meaning to it. (K Apel 2020)