Krashens Natural Order Hypothesis maintains that people acquire components of a second language in a natural order, just as they

do in their first language. Krashen lists a general order for morpheme acquisition, noting that the trend is the same for children and adults from different backgrounds. Specific morphemes within its category may be acquired at different times, but the groupings of morphemes follow an order. This is very important to understand while teaching because direct teaching does not impact the order of acquisition. If a teacher attempts to teach a morpheme before the ELL is ready to acquire it, there will be no success. An example is a teacher who tries to teach s as a possessive marker. When a student is busy acquiring the s as a way to denote plurals, it is likely that the student will not be able to use the possessive s until he arrives at that stage in his own natural order. Cognates are words that come from the same root, meaning literally born together. One way I ask students to define terrestrial is to ask them to list cognates. The list includes terrarium, terrain, terra (firma), terrapin, and extra-terrestrial. From this list, students deduce that terrestrial means of the earth. Another cognate study in use in my class is addressing new words that I am certain students can define from cognates. One such word is morte, as is Le Morte dArthur. I ask the students to tell me what the Spanish and French words are for death. Usually students can translate the French Arthur title, and then we add more cognates: morbid, mortuary, mortal. In the first example, I ask students to list words with the same root. In the second instance, I ask them to provide a foreign word for an English one. In order to teach academic language to ELLs, our book lists several strategies. They include: activate/build background knowledge, preview tests, utilize graphic organizers,

extensive reading, content/general academic vocabulary, and cognate studies. As a teacher of English, I can think of examples of using all of these techniques with ELLs. With a class that has more than one ELL, I find I provide more written and visual vocabulary lists for the students vs. stopping with one ELL and helping in his/her notebook. In addition, I use retelling. Recently, I asked a writing class to prepare a poster on the parts of a paragraph and present to the class. The ELLs each understood words such as topic, conclusion, and detail. Without the students acquiring these academic language words, I could not go on with any lesson. In the case of other vocabulary, such as in literature class, I use visuals such as this presentation found online: http://prezi.com/tswc27pyzvcc/visual-literary-terms/. One thing teachers must realize about morphology when teaching reading is that some languages do not need a particular order for words to create meaning as English does. They also need to remember that one sentence may contain a surface structure and a deep structure. Teachers must also remember it is more effective to describe how a language works rather than to prescribe correct usage. Readers who use syntactic cues allow them to make prediction about meaning. For example, knowing that a word is a noun or a verb is helpful, but understanding that function can help with sentence meaning and predicting what else the sentence will include. Give is a verb, but students will learn through syntactic cues that a direct object will probably be present.