How to teach Reported Speech

Throughout my years as an ESL teacher, I’ve met many colleagues who don’t feel the need to teach reported speech to their ESL students…

I strongly disagree with that approach! We use reported speech (otherwise known as indirect speech) heavily in daily English conversation. The need to report what someone else said arises almost every day. Today, I will share some strategies that I use to teach reported speech to my ESL students.

First, some ideas on when to teach reported speech to your ESL students

Recently, I developed a set of reported speech teaching resources that you can find here. When publishing the lesson plans, I decided to rate each of the six reported speech lessons as “advanced.” Of course, this is not to say that you can only teach reported speech to your advanced students. I’ve rated these lessons advanced as a caution. To construct reported speech, students need to be comfortable with the use of possessive adjectives and most major verb tenses.
Feel free to introduce reported speech to your intermediate level students but make sure to brush up on their major verb tenses first!
Backshifting…
When we move from direct to reported speech we go back a tense:

In my own lesson plans, I’ve decided to introduce the concept of backshifting gradually. In my first reported speech lesson plan (RS1.1-Intro-to-Reported-Speech-1), I start with the basics by backshifting from the Present Simple to the Past Simple. I’ve included here a link to download this lesson, so that you can access it even without a free Off2Class account:

By my third reported speech lesson plan (RS1.3-Intro-to-Reported-Speech-3), I introduce the backshifting principle for all the major tenses:

After backshifting…
Once your students are comfortable with backshifting, there are some additional concepts to teach your students when shifting from direct to indirect (i.e., reported) speech.
Modal Verbs in reported speech: most modal verbs need to be changed when we move from direct to reported speech. Here’s a summary of the major changes (note some modal verbs stay the same!):

Reporting Questions: There are different sets of changes for questions when moving from direct speech to reported speech. This depends on the type of question being reported.
For Yes/No questions, we need to add if or unless to the question in reported speech. (“John asked if I wanted to join him for dinner.”)
For Question Word Questions, we do not switch the order of the subject and verb in the sentence. (“Jenny asked what time it was.”)

Now, get teaching!

We hope these teaching points give you enough confidence to teach reported speech to your ESL students. Your students don’t need to be advanced ESL learners to tackle reported speech, but they do need to be confident in each tense you intend them to backshift between. If you’re not sure about your student’s comfort level, try our RS1.1-Intro-to-Reported-Speech lesson, where we only backshift between the Present Simple and Past Simple.
If you’d like access to the 6 lesson I’ve published on Reported Speech, you can find them at the bottom of our Teacher page.