Morphological skills focus on understanding the meaning of what?

• A. Sentence structure
• B. Semantics
• C. Word parts
• D. Pragmatics

Answer: (C)

Word parts carry meaning. Morphological skills focus on how roots, prefixes, and suffixes come together to convey what a word means and how it functions in speech or writing. For example, the root talk with the suffix -ing signals ongoing action, and adding un- to believe changes the word’s meaning. By looking at these parts, learners can decode unfamiliar words and understand how their forms reflect meaning and grammar. This is different from sentence structure, which deals with how words are ordered to form sentences; semantics, which is the overall meaning of words and sentences; and pragmatics, which concerns how language is used in different social contexts. So focusing on word parts is exactly what morphological skills are about.