Reported Speech
Reported Speech is how we repeat a what we or someone else said, sacrificing word-for-word repetition for the sake of maintaining accuracy or clarity. Since the context of the original quote has since changed (at least in terms of time, but often in terms of place, speaker, and/or audience as well), we need to make a few adjustments. That’s what the Reported Speech structure is for.
What to Expect
Reported Speech is what we use to repeat what we or someone else said earlier (usually). It’s not a word-for-word quote but instead makes adjustments to account for the change of context.
Rather than considering Reported Speech in isolation, let’s look at 3 steps to turning a direct speech sentence into a Reported Speech sentence. We’ll just do declaratives for now, but you can go to the Indirect Questions section for the interrogative equivalents. We’ll also limit ourselves to the reporting verb ‘said’ to keep things simple, but you can check out the Ancillary Topic for alternatives.
Prerequisites
Learners should already be familiar with the following:
Direct Speech, in written form, is surrounded by quotation marks. There should also be a speaker introduction in the sentence (like she asked), and the two parts should be separated by a comma.
Personal Pronouns: subject, object, possessive (determiners), and maybe reflexive.
Demonstratives refer to different things depending on the context. They include this, that, these, and those, which can come in front of nouns (as determiners) or stand alone (as pronouns). They also include the adverbs here, there, now, and then.
Time Expressions – absolute time expressions are good to know, but relative ones are particularly important here. Relative time expressions include yesterday, tomorrow, last week, next month, etc.
Complex Sentences – learners don’t necessarily have to know what complex sentences are, but it may help since Reported Speech involves content clauses.
Proficiency Level
Students at the B1 level are expected to be familiar with Reported Speech. They might start studying it toward the end of the Pre-Intermediate level (or 3rd of 6).*
*actual starting level varies from one course-book series to the next
“ ” ⇨ that
Speaker identification comes at the front. Remove the quotation marks (and comma), and add ‘that’.
backshift
Change the form of the reported verbs so that they are further into the past.
⇌ point-of-view
Alter the reference words like pronouns, determiners, and adverbs so that they reflect the original context.
Bonus Notes
Check out our interactive list of Reporting Verbs (including ‘admit’, ‘claim’, ‘insinuate’, ‘reveal’, and almost 200 other verbs). In the search bar, type in “content clause” to filter the list down to the verbs that work best for Reported Speech as taught on this page.
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