Building New Words with Affixes

Khan Academy

This educational video provides a clear and engaging introduction to affixes, specifically focusing on prefixes and suffixes in the English language. The narrator explains how the English language is flexible, allowing for the creation of new words by attaching these word parts to existing roots. Through step-by-step examples like "reread," "unhappy," and "joyful," the video demonstrates how adding a prefix changes a word's meaning or how a suffix can transform a word's grammatical function, such as turning an adjective into a noun (e.g., "happy" to "happiness"). The video explores key themes of morphology, vocabulary building, and language mechanics. It categorizes common affixes, defining prefixes like 'un-', 're-', 'dis-', and 'mis-', as well as suffixes like '-ful', '-less', '-ly', and '-ness'. The narrator also introduces the concept of stacking affixes to create complex words, using "hopefulness" as a prime example of how a root word can accept both a suffix that makes it an adjective and another that turns it into an abstract noun. For educators, this video serves as an excellent anchor for lessons on word analysis and decoding strategies. It concludes with a creative study strategy where the narrator uses index cards to mix and match roots and affixes, creating nonsense words like "dispetrographic" to deduce meaning. This practical application encourages students to treat language learning as a playful experiment, making it a valuable resource for 2nd through 5th-grade classrooms focusing on reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition.