Punctuation – Apostrophes, question, exclamation, and quotation marks

Apostrophes

Apostrophes are used in contracted words where they stand in place of removed letters, or can be added on to the end of words with an ‘s’ to indicate possession.

It’s hot today.

The dog’s bed.

When teaching apostrophes, it can help to teach these two uses separately to avoid confusion. Once students understand how to use apostrophes, gap fill worksheets can be great tools for giving them plenty of practice. In such exercises, students will have set sentences with apostrophes missing, and will need to choose the correct place to add them.

Question and Exclamation marks

Question marks are used at the end of a sentence and indicate that the phrase is a question and requires an answer. It’s a fairly simple punctuation mark and will be one of the first that your students learn.

Do you like carrots?

Exclamation marks also go at the end of sentences to indicate heightened emotions, typically anger, surprise or other types of emphasis.

I hate you!

Teaching these can be rather straightforward and can often be combined with speaking or listening exercises. For example, having students write dialogues, or role-plays and then acting them out. Or through listening to recordings and then writing down whether a question mark or exclamation mark could have been used.

Quotation marks

Quotation marks are used to surround speech in creative writing, or to indicate direct quotes from other materials in academic writing. Typically, two small marks close together, one pair on each side of the quoted material, are used for most types of writing.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

This is a fairly simple punctuation mark to teach. As a basic rule, you can teach students that if they are quoting someone’s actual words, whether from a text or spoken form, they’ll need to use quotation marks. Also be sure to take care with your students’ use of punctuation inside and outside of the quotation marks, ensuring that they use a period if the quote is used at the end of a sentence.