Character+Quotes

Section 5.1, (Instructional Strategy 3)
 * Character Quotes**

Character Quotes is a strategy for accessing prior student knowledge and hopes to capitalize on students preexisting understanding of human interaction to generate ideas about a literary figure.
 * Rationale:**


 * Instructions:**
 * 1) Write down a number of quotes by a single character in an upcoming novel. Attempt to select quotes that are telling about that particular character in the story. Make sure to have enough cards for the groups into which you intend to separate students.
 * 2) Once separated and provided quotes, instruct the students to work as a group to generate as many descriptors as they can for the speaker of the quote. The goal for them here is to begin compiling a list of character traits that form an image of this character born of their own experiences and vocabularies.
 * 3) Have the groups report out and record their descriptors for the mystery speaker. Once you have all of their input, inform them that all the quotes are uttered by the same character.
 * 4) Guide the students through a discussion of their observations attempting to come to some shared theories about the nature of the character in question. Once you feel that the students are agreed on at least a few elements of the character's persona, have them write a short paragraph description of the character called a personality profile.
 * 5) As students go on to read the text the quotes are drawn from they can return to their profiles in order to improve them or compare them with new images of the character that appear in the text.

This strategy is presented here in its simplest form and as introduced provides an excellent means for generating initial student engagement with a text. The potential in this activity for variation bears its repeat use as well as its incorporation into the curriculum of all levels of student readers. Students can be instructed to identify a number of different elements that appear in a single character's dialogue in a text. Students can be instructed to interact with:
 * Application to Language Arts:**
 * repeated imagery in a particular character's utterances
 * the attitude of the speaker toward another character or subject that he frequently interacts with in the text
 * If the cards are numbered, the students can analyze the change in a character's personality or regard for a subject over the course of a text.
 * High level language arts students can even hone their textual analysis skills looking for consistent linguistic features in a character's language.