Reported speech – tips and activities

Introduction

Reported speech is a very rich grammar area to teach because:

1. It can involve considerable manipulation of form
2. It’s a very easy piece of grammar to locate and exploit with texts.

The activities here are divided into different kinds of drill, ways of exploiting texts and analysis.

Drill: basic substitution

At it’s most basic, you can simply read out a sentence and ask the students to rephrase it beginning with “He said…” “She said…”. For example:

• T: I don’t like it.
• Ss: He said he didn’t like it.
• T: I hate it.
• Ss: He said he hated it.

This can be made a little more interesting in the following ways:
Drill: chain reports
Version 1
The following activity is a variation of the well-known 'broken telephone'. Whisper a sentence in English to a student. That student then whispers it to another and so on until the last student has to say out loud what was said originally.
Version 2
If the above seems too easy, ask students to alternate reported speech/direct speech. If they hear it in reported speech they put it back to direct speech and vice versa. For example:

• T: I like it.
• S1: He said he liked it.
• S2: I like it.
• S3…

Drill: I didn’t get that, what did she say?

This is a quick question drill. Ask a student a question. After they answer, ask another student what was said. For example:

• T: Tomas, how did you get to class today?
• S1: I came by car.
• T: Sorry, I didn’t get that. Yvonne, what did Tomas say?
• S2: He said he had come by car.
• T: Thanks.