What is the recommended first step in teaching affixes?

The recommended first step in teaching affixes is to establish correspondence between letters and sounds. This foundational understanding is crucial for students to effectively decode and comprehend the language they encounter. By recognizing how letters represent sounds, students can better grasp how affixes modify base words. This phonics knowledge sets the groundwork for understanding affixation, enabling learners to break down words into their components and understand how affixes alter meaning.

When students have a solid grasp of phonemes and graphemes, they can apply this understanding to recognize patterns involving prefixes and suffixes in various contexts. This step is particularly important because it allows students to make connections between their existing knowledge of sounds and letters with the new linguistic features they are learning. Thus, focusing on letter-sound correspondence enhances their reading and writing abilities, providing them with tools to navigate more complex vocabulary in the future.