Sviluppare la consapevolezza morfologica: linee guida per un intervento didattico

The present paper discusses the principles that inspired a teaching intervention aimed at fostering middle school pupils' morphological awareness, defined as the ability to reflect on words‟ internal structure and to manipulate morphological components. Morphological awareness has in fact been acknowledged to positively impact on vocabulary growth and reading comprehension. In our paper we outline the main principles on which our intervention was grounded. Specifically, we highlight the importance of providing morphologically complex words in meaningful and engaging contexts; promoting an inductive approach to the analysis of word structure and meaning; proposing activities which make morphological patterns and sublexical constituents less abstract and which encourage morphological problem-solving strategies.