The study examined the effectiveness of using morphemic and contextual analysis on vocabulary learning and reading comprehension. Students were randomly assigned to groups of morphemic-only instruction, context-only instruction, combined morphemic-context instruction, and instructed control. Each of the three experimental groups received twelve 50-minute lessons on different strategies using an explicit instruction model. Morphemic-only students studied eight frequently occurring prefix families; context-only students studied contextual analysis; morphemic-context group students studied combined morphemic and contextual analysis; and the instructed control group studied vocabulary as usual.