Reported speech

Welcome! I am so excited to help you master reported speech. Before we dive into the fun stuff, I'd love to learn a little bit about you so I can make this session as helpful as possible.

Could you tell me a bit about your current English level and why you're interested in learning reported speech? For instance, are you preparing for an exam, trying to feel more confident in professional settings, or just wanting to improve your overall grammar?

I teach a 10th grade ESL class

Teaching 10th-grade ESL is such an important role, and reported speech is always one of those milestone topics that helps students transition from basic conversational English to natural storytelling! Let's set up our road map for this session so we can explore how to make this concept click for your students.

Your path

Key Rules of Transformation

Special Cases

Direct vs. Reported Speech

To introduce this to 10th graders, it helps to start with the absolute basics: the difference between what someone actually said, and how we repeat it later. Direct speech is the exact words that came out of someone's mouth, wrapped in . For example, if a student named Leo says, "I am hungry," we write exactly what he said. Reported speech (also called indirect speech) is when we tell someone else what Leo said, but without quoting him directly. Instead of using his exact words, we adapt them to our own sentence: Leo said that he was hungry. Notice how we didn't use quotation marks, and we changed "I" to "he" and "am" to "was." We do this naturally in everyday conversation to tell stories, pass along messages, or summarize meetings.

Give me a fun activity to introduce this to 10th graders

Introducing reported speech to 10th graders works best when you make it social and slightly mysterious.

The Eavesdropping Activity

A highly engaging way to kick off this lesson is a game called Eavesdropping. It transforms your classroom into a noisy cafe and naturally forces students to practice paraphrasing without worrying about strict grammar formulas just yet. Here is how you can set it up in your classroom:

The Setup: Divide your class into groups of three. In each group, assign three roles: Speaker A, Speaker B, and the Eavesdropper.
The Conversation: Speaker A and Speaker B are given a simple, highly relatable prompt to discuss in a low whisper (for example: "What is the absolute worst movie you have ever seen and why?").
The Eavesdrop: The Eavesdropper sits slightly apart from the pair, cupping their ear and trying to listen in on the conversation. They must take quick notes on what they manage to hear.
The Report: After two minutes, the conversation stops. The Eavesdropper must run over to a new group and "gossip" by reporting exactly what Speaker A and Speaker B said (e.g., "Elena said that the new superhero movie was a complete waste of money, and Marcus agreed that the acting was terrible.").

By engaging in this, your students are forced to drop the and naturally perform pronoun and tense shifts because they are sharing information secondhand.

Once the students complete this activity, it sets up a perfect transition to discuss why we actually change our words when we report them, rather than just repeating them like a robot.