WordRoots™: Building Vocabulary Through Word Families

WordRoots, TextProject’s newest addition, offers educators targeted texts centered on root words to enhance students’ understanding of English word construction. While letter-sound fluency is necessary for decoding written words during reading development, WordRoots develops recognition of morphemes—meaningful word units often neglected in literacy instruction.

English’s richness comes from three distinct linguistic sources:

Anglo-Saxon Foundations form English’s everyday vocabulary—simple, concrete words like love, hate, and house. This layer creates compound words whose meanings often transcend their parts: a bookworm isn’t a worm nor is a butterfly a dairy product. WordRoots texts featuring Anglo-Saxon elements emphasize concrete actions through narratives where characters jump, run, and play.
French/Latin Influences arrived with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, introducing longer, abstract vocabulary with distinct patterns. Words like government and sensation follow these patterns with consistent prefixes and suffixes (pre-, con-, -ment, -tion). The Latin-based WordRoots collection contains texts with word families like nuntiare (to report), connecting words such as announce and pronounce.
Greek Contributions provide specialized scientific and technical terminology, featuring distinctive combining forms like tele-, bio-, -logy, and -graph. These texts might explore concepts like chronophage (time-eater) or explain photographic processes.