Teaching morphology: a structure proposal for the study of word classes and word formation

This paper has as its main goal to conduct a discussion about Morphology teaching on Primary and Secondary schools teaching, led by the topics of word class and word formation processes. Based on the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology (HALLE; MARANTZ, 1993; SCHER, BASSANI e MINUSSI, 2013) and the Linguistic Active Learning Methodology, described by Pilati (2017), we introduce a general structure to word formation in Portuguese. Thus, following the idea that students must "learn to identify patterns", we defend the idea that Morphology teaching must begin by presenting the internal structure of words in Portuguese and discuss grammatical word classes from these structures. As a result, we built a "word formator" manipulable material, to help teachers and students in tasks such as (i) to surface students' implicit morphological knowledge; (ii) to stimulate the students' creativity; (iii) to teach the formative elements of words (roots and affixes in general); (iv) to teach word formation processes and (v) to teach grammatical categories.