Reported speech

Lesson

	level	Skill	Age	Time
	Int+	Grammar: Reported Speech	Adults	90+

The lesson uses cartoons to give learners fun practice of what can sometimes be a boring grammar item.

Click on the links above to get straight to the lesson, what follows is my thought process in putting the lesson together

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Why I designed this class

Problems with teaching reported speech

I wasn’t very happy this week when I opened the coursebook and saw that I had to teach reported speech. I often feel it’s a dry topic that isn’t much use to students. My colleague disagreed with me however - he argued that without it we don’t know who did what to whom. As he is a non-native speaker and has learnt a second language to a much higher level than me I figured his opinion might more accurately reflect how my students felt than my own.

The conversation prompted me to think a bit about why I don’t like teaching reported speech and read around the topic a little. That’s when I came across Ian P Harman’s anecdote of a reported speech lesson gone wrong.

What I intended to do was to start the lesson by asking my learners a series of questions. I would write their answers on the board (sandwiched between inverted commas), after which I would demonstrate the transformations which needed to be made when converting direct to indirect speech. What is more, I would be able to explain the backshifting of verbs, changes in adverbials etc. through ‘live’ communicative dialogue. I boldly entered the classroom and began the routine. ‘Carlos, where do you come from?’ Carlos, slightly bemused, replied: ‘I come from Spain.’ ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ I wrote the reply on the board: ‘I have two brothers but no sisters.’ … ‘When did you arrive in England?’ … ‘I arrived here last week.’ When I had enough material, I gave my stock explanation of how these written answers could be converted from direct to indirect speech: ‘The first thing in reported speech is to move our tenses back one place - ‘here’ becomes ‘there’, ‘this’ becomes ‘that’, ‘now’ becomes ‘then’, et cetera … Now, what did Carlos say?’ Ariane, the bright Italian girl, put up her hand: ‘Carlos said that he came from Spain.’ I was feeling rather pleased with myself. I wrote up the sentence and explained the use of ‘that’. During the reporting of the second sentence, however, I began to wonder if I fully understood indirect speech: ‘What’s wrong with: Carlos said he comes from Spain?’ - the sentence doesn’t follow my guidelines but it sounds OK to me. However, it was the third sentence which really threw me. Reassured by her initial success, Ariane stated confidently: ‘Carlos said that he had arrived there the previous week.’! Confused, I went back to the drawing board.

In Harman’s own words reported speech is “not an easy nut to crack” as

the three variables of time, place, and person do not change consistently between the original and reported utterance.

Which is probably the crux of why I don’t like teaching reported speech. Coursebooks don’t always make it clear that the tense shift is often optional.

When something someone said is true we can often leave the verb as it is. This can either be a general truth.

Bananas are yellow ->  Carlos said bananas are yellow.

Or something that remains true at the time of speaking.

I came here three weeks ago -> Carlos said he came here three weeks ago

This is why establishing a clear context when teaching reported speech is important and it’s a good idea to avoid marginal cases with lower level learners. Check out the lesson for my take on teaching reported speech in a more interesting way.

Further reading

	Author	Title
	Ian P. Harman	Teaching indirect speech deixis points the way