Learning outcomes

Case study: learning to use inverted commas
Lloyd, a final year BA student, found, when listening to children in his Year 3 class read during shared and guided reading, that many seemed to ignore inverted commas and failed to change tone or expression when speech began or ended. He decided to use shared reading to focus children’s attention on the function of inverted commas.
Lloyd chose a passage of dialogue from Roald Dahl’s Matilda and read it to the children, changing his voice when Miss Trunchbull, Matilda or other characters spoke. He then allocated roles to children and asked them to read only the words their characters said, while everyone else read all of the words which were not direct speech. Occasionally, a few children either read beyond their speech or read into other people’s speech, but almost everyone quickly grasped the idea that inverted commas surrounded the words spoken.
Lloyd went on to develop a shared writing activity in which children used mini-whiteboards to write suggested dialogue for an invented episode involving Matilda at school as a conversation progressed. Lloyd asked for examples of what characters might say and wrote some on the board. He then asked children for suggestions as to how words might have been said, for example, shouted Miss Trunchbull loudly; whispered Amanda nervously. As the dialogue developed, Lloyd drew attention to punctuation, discussing the use of commas, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks.
There are many other ways in which you might develop children’s understanding of correct usage of inverted commas. You might follow up an activity such as Lloyd’s by giving children short extracts from playscripts and asking them to rewrite them as direct speech. This is best done on a computer so that children can focus on the key learning by cutting and pasting, rather than having to write everything out by hand.
Curriculum links
Children should learn how to use inverted commas in direct speech from Year 3 and learn that they are also known as inverted commas. It is important to explain that inverted commas can be single or double (increasingly they tend to be single). As children develop their writing, they may sometimes need to use inverted commas within inverted commas as below:
“I asked her to tell me where it was and she just said ‘I don’t know!’ in a really grumpy way,” said James angrily.
On these occasions, we use whichever version of inverted commas we didn’t use around the main speech to indicate the quotation within it.
Some teachers show classes how to remember the correct punctuation for direct speech with the mnemonic: 66 Capital One of 4 99, which translates as:

• 
  66 – open inverted commas;
  
• 
  capital: speech begins with a capital letter (unless it is the second part of a sentence broken by he, said etc. – see below);
  
• 
  one of 4 (? ! ,.);
  
• 
  99 (close inverted commas).
  

Of course, they might equally well teach them 6 Capital One of 4 9. If you use this mnemonic it is important to remind children that the inverted commas are not really numbers at all, but just have the same shapes as 6 and 9.