Morphology is usually approached as the teaching of vocabulary. It is, of course, necessary to teach words, but it is also necessary to teach affixes because they carry meaning too. When teaching prefixes and suffixes (the only kind of affixes you'll be teaching in ESL), it is necessary to teach what types of bases affixes attach to.

It is easier to teach a few affixes at a time and to provide practice with them instead of trying to teach all at once.

Teach inflectional affixes in conjunction with meaning needs for other work: plural –s when teaching nouns; third person singular –s when teaching verbs; -er for person when teaching jobs.

Recycle the meanings of affixes at an intermediate level, and show how students can use them to guess the meanings of new words: There are fewer affixes than there are words.

Begin by analyzing known words, then introduce less well-known words, then completely new words.

For advanced learners, teach foreign borrowings.

For advanced learners, highlight the nuances between words with the same root, same lexical category, but different usage: for example what is the difference between civility and civilization? After all, both are nouns, and both come from the root civil.

Activity: Using Affixes as Vocabulary

The links below take you to interactive exercises that show how learning affixes can build students' vocabulary without learning each word as an individual vocabulary item. Students would be at an intermediate English level before seeing these exercises.

The prefixes sheet is essentially a reference list. Students wouldn't be expected to simply memorize every prefix on the list through rote memorization. They would have already learned many of them before receiving this list.

The suffixes list shows how the use of roots and affixes is useful in guessing the meanings of new words. This is where the first exercises are included.

The roots worksheet introduces some of the bound roots which are harder to find and know the meaning of. This sheet also has exercises.