Teaching Tone
- rachelturkowski10
- Mar 2, 2022
- 2 min read
I find tone incredibly challenging to teach, and my first few years in the classroom I would gloss over it. This year, I decided to embrace the challenge of teaching tone to high school students.
Since tackling tone head-on, I’ve realized it isn’t as difficult to teach as I once believed. In fact, students, for the most part, understand tone and can explain it, although they may struggle with identifying a precise word. After reflecting on why this task is difficult, despite the numerous handouts to help guide them, I’ve concluded that students most likely don’t
have a strong grasp on the denotation and connotations of tone words. In a few weeks, I’ll be teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I plan to spend a lesson exploring shades of meaning when using synonyms–not only to describe the author’s or narrator’s tone, but also characterization. If students understand that synonyms have shades of meaning, I am hopeful they can improve their ability to pinpoint accurate tone words.
In my time exploring tone and best practices for teaching it, I’ve gathered several helpful strategies from other experienced teachers I’d like to share with you:
Teach tone using a children’s book or a text that doesn’t include irony. Tackling irony needs to come after students have a fair understanding of what tone is and how to identify it.
Make sure students understand the difference between mood and tone. I always tell students that although tone can impact a piece of writing’s mood, the two devices are not interchangeable.
Understand that tone is the author’s attitude or the character’s attitude, and the narrator’s and the character’s tone can be different. This difference helps establish the theme of the novel or short story.
They need to first identify the subject or topic of the work before they can identify the tone.
Tone is not a constant and when students spot a tone shift, they can also uncover a theme.
Here’s a handout I give my students to use while they work on identifying tone. It outlines what tone is and is not, what it establishes, and steps to take to identify tone.
Thanks for reading my post about tone, and please leave a comment if you have any strategies to help students understand tone.
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