ABSTRACT
By fourth grade, most average students are generalising their knowledge of prefixes, suffixes and roots to decipher the meanings of hundreds of new words encountered in reading.
Moats (1995)
Competent, mature readers and spellers (as opposed to struggling or emerging spellers) rely on their ability to break longer words down into easily manageable parts. They have some knowledge of the rules of syllable division. They have a working vocabulary of prefixes and suffixes (known collectively as affixes). They know and understand a good number of root words too. Their literacy is now much more based on the structure and content of word forms (morphology).
