12 Essential English – Australian narratives unit – Dialogue + Tim Winton’s ‘Big World’

About the PPT: This lesson was designed to teach students about dialogue and how it can be used to reveal the personality of the characters. It begins with a definition of dialogue and an explanation of reported and direct speech. Some examples of each are provided and students need to identify which is which. There is an excerpt from the anthology ‘Growing up Asian’ which students can read as an example of how characterisation is driven through dialogue. There was also information about placing dialogue tags at the beginning, middle and end of a quote for variety. There is an activity sheet for variants to the word said. After checking the answers, there is information about how to punctuate dialogue correctly. Following this the story for today ‘Big World’ was introduced. Some of the terms that students may be unfamiliar with have been defined on the slide. After reading the story, there are some discussion questions which I use with the students. Students then share their responses for the retrieval chart. The lesson ends with a 5 question multi-choice quiz about punctuating dialogue correctly.

Other resources:
A copy of the Short Story and the retrieval chart

Context: A lesson designed for use in a 12 Essential English classroom in Queensland, Australia as part of Unit 4: “Representations and popular culture texts - Topic 2: Creating representations of Australian identities, places, events and concepts.” During this unit students learned about Australian social groups. They engaged with a range of short stories representing Australia. Their assessment was to write a short story which explored a gap/silence from one of the texts they studied in class.