Close Reading for Understanding Dialogue

    Young readers have a great deal of trouble with dialogue. It seems as if the task of every autumn for me is to help readers learn how to recognize dialogue, figure out who is speaking in dialogue, and visualize conversations as they read.  And what an important task this is! Dialogue carries plot details and characterization. When students don't know who is speaking, or don't realize the importance of dialogue, they miss essential details of a story.
    For fourth graders, tracking a conversation in text without pictures requires careful attention to detail. After some initial instruction, I was curious to see what my students could do. I designed this assessment to peek in at their processes:

Dialogue Assessment from Emily Kissner

   As I looked at student responses, I noticed several patterns.

1. Every question correct. About a quarter of my students answered every question correctly. This doesn't mean that their instruction is done--in fact, it means that students are ready to really explore dialogue and learn how to wring more meaning from it.
2. Trouble with Line 4. Notice how the dialogue in Line 4 does not have a speaker tag. Readers have two ways to identify the speaker. They could look at the textual conventions of quotation marks and a new paragraph to know that someone new is talking. Alternatively, they could look at the context of the conversation to know that the miller wouldn't thank himself. Students who did not answer this question correctly often said "the miller" or even "sir".
3. Trouble with "You look tired". Teachers who know kids--really know kids--will not be surprised to hear that a decent number of students said "the miller" in response to this question. Skilled adult readers are shocked by this, as they clearly see that the miller has dropped out of the story by this point. However, readers who are having trouble managing characters in their heads will assign dialogue to anyone that seems convenient!

Next Steps
   I hate "going over" tests. This is probably a major character flaw. Instead of "going over" the answers, I made clean copies for all students who scored less than 4/5. Then I gathered the students in small groups to reteach. Together, we read the text and aloud and answered the questions again.
    I used sticky notes to symbolize each character, so that we could talk about who was in the story when. This helped students to see that Hans leaves the mill on Line 10, which makes the miller drop out of the story.
    The small group setting helped students to talk out their issues and their misconceptions. "Well, of course the miller wouldn't say thank you," one student said. "It would be kind of silly for him to thank himself for gold."
   "Oh, the rider is a different person!" another student exclaimed. "Well, that makes a lot more sense."
   I waited until after we had discussed the passage to hand out the scored assessments that students had already taken. Then we were able to talk about new understandings. What did students know now that they didn't know then? How were they thinking through the story events differently? How might this help them with their independent reading books?

Resources
    I eventually wrote three dialogue assessments, which I have added to Analyzing Story Elements. It took us a few tries to get it right! Even now there are still some students that are working on identifying narrators in first person stories. More lessons on identifying speaker in dialogue can be found in my book, The Forest AND the Trees.

New Texts

    Last year I wanted to combine social studies and fluency. I realized that my struggling readers needed much, much more exposure to the names of states! I wrote sets of leveled geography texts about different regions of the United States. I think that I can safely say it is one of the more difficult writing tasks that I have undertaken. You can find them here:
-US Geography Leveled Readings Northeast
-US Geography Leveled Reading South
-US Geography Leveled Readings Midwest
-US Geography Leveled Readings West
    Hawai'i and Alaska are both so big and interesting that they deserve their own texts, which aren't quite finished yet.

What's New on Frolyc
    I have lots of texts and activities for student iPads over at Frolyc. If you want to see new activities, subscribe to the What's New on Activity Spot Pinterest board. This month I have worked on Genres: Science Fiction and Fantasy, Autumn Poem, Anthony Wayne (a chronological order text) and more.

Start the School Year with a Focus on Dialogue

In our curriculum, we start the school year with stories and story elements. I love this beginning as it helps us to talk about big ideas like theme and summarizing. But I also realize that, to help students figure out these big ideas, sometimes we need to focus on smaller details.

One of these small details is dialogue. In a story, dialogue can serve many purposes. Sometimes dialogue shows us insight into a character's personality or motives. Dialogue can also move the story forward and reveal information. Skipping over dialogue would lead to a fractured reading experience.

And yet...many young readers have great trouble in figuring out who is speaking in dialogue! The tiny clues to skilled readers use to match speaker to speech are invisible to many young readers. They don't notice the paragraph breaks or the empty white space at the end of lines. They can't track split dialogue. When speaker tags are not included, they have trouble following the back-and-forth of a typical conversation.

Figuring out who is speaking is a kind of text-based inference. Readers need to combine the clues in the text with their background knowledge of how text works. And this is hard! Even readers who are on and above grade-level can struggle with dialogue. 

1. Find out what kids can do with reading dialogue
I like to sit with kids as they are reading. Sometimes I listen to students read, and sometimes we read aloud together. During these conversations, I ask, "Who is speaking?" or "How do you know who is talking at this point?" These conversations help me to figure out the sub-conscious rules that students are or are not using to figure out who is speaking.

2. Model understanding who is speaking by displaying read-aloud text
With a document projector or overhead projector, show students the text that you are reading aloud. I like to make little sticky note tags or even little sketches of the characters to display at the same time. Then, I go back and forth to show who is speaking at each point. It's fun to engage students in this as well.


3. Label dialogue in text
This requires some colored pencils. Give students a copy of a short piece of text, and talk explicitly about the rules of dialogue. What does it mean when a new paragraph begins? How can we tell that a person is still speaking? Underline dialogue by different characters in different colors. 

You can extend the conversation by talking about what the dialogue reveals. Does it show us what characters are like? Reveal details of the plot? An example of this activity is included in the Literature Circle Materials below.




In the past I saved some of these lessons for later in the year. This year, though, I think that I will face them early on. Understanding the little rules of print and the conventions that authors follow will only help us as we begin our exploration of stories and narratives.

Some other lessons for teaching about text-based inferences and understanding dialogue can be found in my book The Forest and The Trees.

Character Traits and Emotions: Making Inferences: This unit includes an activity in which students write dialogue to show character traits.

Text-Based Inferences and More: This pack includes more resources for teaching text-based inferences.

Text-based inferences: Who's Talking?

As we move past state testing and into the last months of the year, I like to have students work in literature circles. Literature circles are a great way to get kids talking about their books and engaging with text.

For my transitional readers, though, the literature circle books I've chosen present some new challenges. In Misty of Chincoteague and Bunnicula, there are exchanges of dialogue in which the speaker is not identified. While I'd like to believe that all of my students have mastered the ability to pick their way through tricky dialogue, I know that this is not the case.

To help them work through the dialogue, my student teacher and I tried this simple activity. After talking about ways that we know how different characters are speaking, we gave students a short snippet of a story and directed them to use colored pencils to underline the dialogue of the different characters.

What a revealing activity this is! Identifying the speaker in dialogue is, after all, a kind of inference. This inference is text-based--that is, it pulls on the reader's background knowledge of how text works. As I talked with students about their work, I was able to gain some insight into how they thought about text. "How did you know that this was Robert?" I asked one student.

"Oh, well," he said. "There were already two people in the kitchen, and then someone else came in. So I pictured him coming in, and then I just knew that he had to be the older brother." Here, I could learn much about how this student was processing the text--he was visualizing the setting, and tracking the movements of the characters. These are the skills he needs to be successful with understanding a story.

But I learned about problems as well. One student underlined the entire first five lines. "But, ___, why did you underline so much? There are no quotation marks," I asked, a little puzzled.

He answered, "Because she's the one who's telling the story, right? So she's talking." Oh! In this case, the student had mistaken the narration of the first-person narrator for dialogue. Think about how this changes his perception of the time of the story and how it unfolds. I grabbed a new copy of the page and tried to explain. "She's the one telling the story, yes. But it's not the same as dialogue. Look, the dialogue is down here--see, with the quotation marks? That's how we know that different people are speaking."

He dutifully took the colored pencil and underlined where I had shown him. But I could tell that he still wasn't convinced. And I was falling down the rabbit-hill of teacher-thinking: trying to figure out how he was building his mental model of the story, and how the time of the first-person narrator was different from the story-time, and how perhaps I should have used a third-person text for this activity, but that maybe it was better to have a first-person text, because now I knew this was a problem, and how this would impact teaching the writing of first person narratives, and maybe this was why some kids were so resistant to adding dialogue to those narratives--because they thought they were already using dialogue.

Lots to think about there! And that, to me, is the hallmark of a great classroom activity--situations like this that get me thinking about all of those spaces between what we think we teach and what kids are actually thinking and learning.

If you'd like to give this activity a try, check it out below or download it here. (And there is more about teaching these kinds of text-based inferences in my book The Forest and the Trees, if you want to know more.)

Dialogue activity

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Summarizing Dialogue

As I wrote last week, we're in the final stretch of test prep, and so we are brushing up on story elements and fiction summarizing. The students did a nice job of summarizing the story "The Goose in the Blackberry Patch". However, they had some trouble with the story "The Mystery Eggs".

Why? The stories are both fairly short. On the surface, they seem to be somewhat similar. However, it didn't take me long to realize the problem--"The Mystery Eggs" contains much more dialogue.

And it is the dialogue that's so tricky for students to summarize. Many of my capable readers wanted so earnestly to provide a faithful accounting of the events that they tried to explain the characters' conversation. It sounded something like this--"Melanie said the eggs were bird eggs, and Clara said no they are not." Some of them ran out of room before they were able to explain all of the events and tell how the problem was solved.

What to do next? For testing, I am not too concerned...as long as students get the key events (and most did), they should be fine.

But I now have a wonderful direction for instruction once testing is over. We had already planned to begin literature circles.  I'm going to continue to work on summarizing that tricky dialogue. I've created a list of words to use for summarizing dialogue, and some practice activities. As students read their literature circle novels, they'll try to find pages that are heavy in dialogue, and summarize those pages.

Summarizing dialogue

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You can find the story "The Mystery Eggs" here, under the Grade 4 Reading Sampler for 2008-2009. It's a really fun one that kids always like, despite the fact that I use it for test prep.