Teaching Reported Speech? Get the Hacks!
Are you teaching Reported Speech and your students are not engaged? Don’t drive yourself bananas!!! Let me share with you some fun and creative activities and exercises to help your students understand this language concept. Through these fun ideas and games, you’ll capture your students’ attention and help them better understand and consolidate indirect speech. Whoo hoo!
Hack 1: Presentation
Introduce your students to the concept of the way we report different speech structures like statements, questions, commands, and requests. Once they understand these different types, you can provide examples of each one and give them a chance to practice constructing their own sentences. You can share this infographic with your learners. CLICK TO DOWNLOAD.
Warm-Up Idea: Social Media Updates! Ask students to search and show other students social media posts in direct speech, and then ask them to report what these posts would sound like in indirect speech.
Hack 2: Time to Practice
Provide your students with a short passage and have them rewrite it using reported speech. You can also give them a list of sentences to choose from and ask them to convert direct speech into indirect speech.
Hack 3: Let the fun begin!
Looking for a unique way to cement your students’ understanding of Reported Speech? Add games to your lessons for students to put into practice their knowledge of this grammar concept.
🎲Game 1: Reported Speech Relay
Start by dividing the class into teams. Supply each team with a series of direct speech sentences. In each team, one member is responsible for converting these sentences into reported speech, while the others must reverse the process and turn them back into direct speech. The team that accurately completes this transformation challenge the most times is declared the winner!
🎲Game 2: Whisper Down the Lane
Have students sit in a circle. Whisper a direct speech sentence to the first student, who must then report it to the next student using reported speech. Continue around the circle, and the last student says the reported sentence out loud. Compare it to the original direct speech sentence to see how accurate the transformation was.
🎲Game 3: Report the Quote!
Ask students to read the quote and rephrase it using their own words. You can also ask them to turn the quote into indirect speech. VIDEO HERE!
🎲Game 4: Turn the Lyrics into Direct Speech
Students read what the singer has said. They have to paraphrase it and turn it into direct speech. Then, they listen to the song and check their answers. CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE GAME!
➡️ If you like using songs in class, check out this blog post! CLICK HERE!
Remember to provide clear explanations and examples before diving into these activities, and gradually increase the complexity of the reported speech structures as students become more comfortable with the concept.
Anyways, reported speech doesn’t have to be a boring topic; on the contrary, it can be lots of fun! So kickstart the excitement and witness your students’ progress!
Unleash the Grammar Wizards inside your ESL students with these grammar games!
