Teaching Direct and Indirect Speech

Introduction

Teaching English grammar can at times be complicated as there are many topics and articles involved. This can be true especially when dealing with students who grew up with English as their second language or in other countries which have a different model of teaching. Therefore it is the work of the teacher to make the learning process enjoyable, interactive, and productive for the students. Due to the limitation of time and space, this report will look at the teaching direct and indirect speech to high school students. Though some of these students are interested in learning grammar, most are there to meet graduation requirements. And, given that they are learning English as a second language, they find it difficult to edge out the influence their mother tongue has on learning grammar. The indirect speech, otherwise known as reported speech, is heavily used in English conversations and thus the need to teach it across all the levels in the education realm. The urge to communicate what other people said occurs in almost every aspect of daily life. The article gives the ideas on effective means of teaching the students on grammar as far as direct and indirect speech is concerned. The topic has rules that should be adhered to when transitioning between the two. These regulations include changing the pronouns, tense, conjunctions and others when writing or speaking out a reported speech.

Meaning of direct and indirect speech

The teaching and learning of direct and indirect speech can efficiently occur through reading and writing dialogue (Parmar, 2014). Teachers can illustrate the difference between the two by first reading the discussion and working through the examples. For direct speech, the speaker is quoted while an indirect speech occurs when a different person paraphrases what the original speaker said. The students reinforce the principles of grammar by the practical application when they write and speak dialogue themselves. Before we look at the influence of the language has on ESL students, it is imperative to know what direct and indirect speech are used.

Usage of Reported Speech

Reporting what someone else said is essential in ensuring the information reaches the third party or the audience. There are two means of communicating the speech, and they are direct speech and indirect speech. The former refers directly to what the other person says precisely and reflects the actual words. For instance, when reporting a statement from the following dialogue, we can quote exactly what Ben said.

Ben: I am very hungry.

When reporting using direct speech, we say; Ben said, “I am very hungry.” It is clear that we quote what the person said directly by adding the reporting indicators.

Teaching high school students is not as difficult as teaching beginners. At least, they have the basics of grammar from the previous classes. However, the complexity of the reported speech conversion from direct recourse causes the confusion for the students who are using English as their second language. All the changes required when transitioning makes the teaching more difficult. To begin with, the students must first understand the usefulness of indirect speech when having a conversation and that the usage of “quote” and “unquote” is awkward. The teacher must also encourage them to use the alternative reported verbs other than “say” and “tell.” The students have to adhere to the rules of conversion as applied to English grammar but which may be lacking in their native languages.

When starting of the teaching of reported speech, the first thing to do is introduce the usage of the direct and indirect recourse beginning with the tenses.

Direct Speech

As stated earlier, the direct speech is a report of the exact words that proceeded from the mouth of the speaker or writer without changing anything. For high school learning English as the second language, a lot of mistakes can arise and hence leading to errors. As a matter of clarification, errors and mistakes are different in terms of definition. The latter refers to subtle performance glitches that arises from a random guess or slip and can be corrected easily by the learner. On the other hand, an error is a serious grammatical mistake that is systemic and arises from lack of competence in English language. The deviation is higher in the conversion of direct speech into an indirect one. The discourse is always put in quotation marks and followed with reporting verb, quotative frame, or signal phrase. While introducing this, the teacher will give examples to shine more light on the students. Functionally, the direct speech purports to give a verbatim rendition of the exact words that were used.

Indirect Speech

Also referred to as indirect recourse, the indirect speech is the report given on what someone else said without using the exact words they used ( Regmi, 2009) . The main difference that is observable between the direct and indirect speech is the lack of quotation marks when reporting. Other features include the change in the verb tenses and the pronoun. The word order is also different in the two forms of speech ( Regmi, 2009) . When teaching the ESL high school students on this section, there is need for demonstration using examples as indicated below.

Direct speech: “Where is your brother?” the teacher asked him.

Indirect speech: The teacher asked him where his brother was.

The above examples illustrate how the conversion of direct to indirect speech causes the change of tenses and pronouns. This act is just one of the many rules of translation that accompanies the reported speech (Robart, n.d). For the instructor to be effective in teaching the students who learn English as a second language, he or she has to be well versed in the rules.

Rules for Converting Direct Speech to Indirect Speech

When considering reported speech, there are grammatical changes that must take effect for it to make sense and be correct while keeping the original meaning that the person intended. Of most importance is the change that occurs in the verb tenses, pronouns, and the adjectives describing time and place.

Verb Tense Changes in Reported Speech

The verb tenses are often employed in formal reported speech where writing is mostly used. Conventionally, English speakers did not need to make verb changes when reporting a statement. Informal reporting, the verb goes back in time one tense. In other words, when the verb is in present tense, it must be taken to past tense. When it is in past tense, then it must be made to past participle and so on. For example, the statement; Rose said, “I like playing with my dog” can be changed to its reported speech as; Rose said she liked playing with her dog. It is clear that the verb “like” becomes “liked.”

Other examples:

Direct speech: Rose said, “I liked playing with my dog.”

Indirect speech: Rose said she had liked playing with her dog (the verb “liked” becomes “had liked”)

When dealing with the students, formal reporting is the most challenging hence a lot of effort needs to be put around that area. In English, the change in the verb tenses takes the logic that the person who initially spoke the words did so in the past. Thus, when reporting, we give account of what was said in the past. This rule is also known as back-shift of tense.

The rolling back of these verbs is the most significant contributor to the grammatical errors that are associated with the conversion of direct speech to indirect speech. However, there are errors related to the other rules.

Pronoun change in reported speech

In indirect speech, the pronoun of the reported speaker changes according to who delivers the speech and who listens. This is so because of the change in speaker and the listener. The reporter is the previous listener, and the speaker is referred to as reported. Of importance are the personal pronouns which relate to the speaker in direct speech. The changes that they undergo must conform to the situation. The first person pronoun changes according to the subject of the reporting verb in the reported statement. The pronoun changes when the reporting verb is a third person pronoun.

Examples:

Direct speech: Mike said, “I like playing piano.”

Indirect speech: Mike said he likes playing the piano.

In case of a reporting verb being first person pronoun (that is I, we, mine, ours, us, our), the change does not occur, and the subject is reported as it is.

Examples:

Direct speech: I said, “I don’t like traveling.”

Indirect speech: I said that I do not like traveling.

Second person pronoun (that is you, your) changes according to the subject of the reporting verb. On the other hand, in a reported speech that has a third person pronoun (that is him, her, them, they, he, and she); it does not change in indirect speech.

Change in Place and Time.

As stated in the prior section on tenses, we saw that the time of reporting the speech becomes backshifted to the past (Robart, n.d). This means that even the time changes to a more previous one. The same applies to adverbs that express the place where the reference is made in the reported speech.

Reported Questions

In changing direct questions to indirect ones, some rules must be followed as well. In all conditions, the final sentence should have statement word order in that it should have subject plus a verb ( Whittle, 2016) . The auxiliaries “did,” “does,” and “do” are not used. When reporting the question indirectly, the question mark at the end of the direct speech is omitted, and thus the indirect questions are ending with a period.

Example:

Direct speech: Winfred asked, “Did John attend the class?”

Indirect speech: Winfred asked if John attended the class.

The reported questions are confusing to the ESL students as they are similar to embedded queries but having different structure. The embedded items are always in other statements or questions.

For instance, a sentence that reads, “I don’t know what time the train arrives.” This sentence has a question inside a statement and thus considered embedded. Similarly, it can occur in another question (Whittle, 2016). For instance, “Can you tell me what time the train arrives?” For direct speech, the question would be, “What time does the train arrive?”

Errors in Conversion from Direct to Indirect Speech

It is a commonplace to find that ESL high school students face challenges when dealing with direct and indirect speech are common in learning English. First of all, it is not by default that they understand what the basics are and how they connect with each other until the level of high school. When dealing with direct and indirect speech, high levels of grammatical correctness is required to derive a sense out of the statements.

When an individual does not understand the correct order of components, punctuations, and flow in English sentences, then errors occur. Such mistakes are common in the teaching of ESL students. They are prone to use grammatical items in such a way that fluent, or native English speaker would regard as being faulty or showing incompleteness. The students who learn English as their second language commit errors which stem from many sources.

Sources of Errors

Inter-lingual errors

When students start to convert the direct speech to indirect, they begin by what they already are familiar with. When all they know is their first language, they try to translate it into English directly. The translation task does not go all smooth all the time, and many students cannot get it correctly due to the influence that their mother tongue has on them ( Baker & Bricker, 2010) . Also, most of these students only practice reporting speech in classrooms and when they are out, they forget about it. All of them have different backgrounds and have diverse professional interests. Thus it is challenging for them to concentrate their practice on the conversion of reported speech (Baker & Bricker, 2010). Due to the numerous grammatical elements that come into play when dealing with reported speech, most students find it difficult to cope. In the direct speech acts, the students do not find a hard time but only sees the difficulty in indirect acts where there is an implication on the native language. For instance, in Spanish, the translation form direct to indirect speech does not change as seen in English.

Over-generalization

Students can be tempted to create a different sentence structure and make it apply in any case concerning their previously-learned in English. For example, they might start using “said” everywhere even when reporting questions.

Ignorance of rule restrictions

In some cases, the students fail to observe the limits, or are not even aware that there are. They over-generalize the structure to fit what they already know. For instance, they may form a structure like “told to me” as they have seen it being used in “said to me.” They think that the rule holds for the two. Most mistakes spring from the fact that the students think to "say" and "tell" have the same meaning.

Incomplete application of rules

In reporting what others say, there are too many rules. It is therefore impossible to see all students avoiding errors when applying the theoretical knowledge to deal with the conversion. Many students find it challenging to invert the order of words in an indirect reporting of speech and also the use of “if/whether” for the yes/no questions (Ri & Ri, 2017). A lot of mistakes also come from the reporting of questions that have “do”, “did”, and “does”. The back-shifting exercise proves to be a menace because of the variety of the tenses that have the rules for each one of them, which makes the students confused and fail to apply them correctly. Also, they do not use the past tense as per the rules, especially when dealing with the negative and the auxiliary verbs and most times confuse the past simple and past perfect (Ri & Ri, 2017). When such happens, they report the present verbs wrongly into past simple, and even sometimes report the past simple ones into past participles.

Hypercorrection

This error comes from over-application of the basic rules of tense change and the lack of awareness of where the rule is of exception. The basic rule is that the verb that has the present tense in the direct speech becomes past tense in the reported discourse. For instance; He said, “I LIKE the game.” Becomes; He said that he LIKED the game ( Cook, 2010) . But, there are some exceptions to this rule. For example, when the verb describes a constant action, refers to religious facts, or expresses an endless truth, it is not changed for tense in reported speech. As an illustration, it is perfectly legitimate and grammatically correct to say, He said he LIKES the game (If at all it continues and in a constant mode). What brings the problem is the fact that the students are sometimes misguided by insufficient familiarity with how complex the grammatical rules are.

When dealing with the over correctness, some students will make mistakes when reporting sentences like this: She said she believed God existed. This sentence should be written: She said she believes God exists. It is a religious fact that God exists and can never and will not die. Another example is such a sentence like: He said the sun rose in the East. According to science, it is well known that the sun rising is an eternal event (Cook, 2010). To add on the exceptions, when the event has not yet occurred at the time of reporting, the tense of the verb remains as the original one. For instance, “He said that the project WILL be through in 2030.” Also, if the verb is put in present tense in the reported direct speech, it does not change when writing in the indirect speech.

Example;

Direct speech: “We will all come tomorrow,” she says.

Indirect speech: She says that they would all come the following day.

When the students are not careful, they tend to make mistakes as they consider every statement to be the same.

Misanalysis

This is one of the most frequent grammatical mistakes that ESL students commit. They come from the wrong process of analyzing the information and getting to understand the entire sentence. Consequently, they change the possessives, pronouns, object pronouns in the direct speech into the ones in indirect speech inappropriately.

Recommendations

In general, students of English as second language have a considerable amount of difficulty getting to use the reported speech because of the numerous grammatical considerations that have to be undertaken to make sense out of it. Thus, the teaching should be done transparently and efficiently, which is not easy in a classroom with students from different backgrounds. There are however some recommendations on how to tackle the whole issue.

Engage the Students in Creating a Context

The teacher should use a far more useful approach to establish a context that the students can relate to instead of just coming in to begin the lesson by “Open your books to page…” The framework must be able to provide the students with the opportunity to talk about their life experiences.

Involve the Students

Try to make the students as much involved as possible in the entire learning period to get their motivation and interests high (Smith, 2010). This should be done by asking questions, eliciting target language, and making the students write on the board. The teacher should make an initiative of talking with the students rather than to them (Smith, 2010). A participatory approach would enhance learner autonomy, which is an essential requirement for learning a language.

Provide a Lot of Examples Rather Than a Rule

As students see through a pattern, examples would make sure they find a cognitive connection to the target language as they will always relate.

Provide a Lot of Opportunity to Practice

Finally, the teacher should create an opportunity for the students to practice what they have learned ( McGrath, 2013) . This should be done through initiating activities that accommodate the different learning styles. The students should be encouraged to practice the grammar both in class and outside. As stated earlier, the interactive approach will help in ensuring the high school students have interest in English rather than just being there to fulfill the requirement for graduation.

Proper preparation of Teachers

When dealing with bilingual high school students, the teacher needs to be knowledgeable about the requirements and the demand that they pose. Therefore, the preparation of new teachers should be done in a manner that addresses the voids. At the current juncture, there is a little connection among the people educating the teachers and the requirements in terms of skills and knowledge that is needed in the teaching of ESL high school students ( Faltis & Valdés, 2016) . Thus, the effectiveness of teaching English grammar in a linguistically diverse classroom is at stake for those students speaking English as a second language. Teachers may be able to use unusual measures in order to make the learning more enjoyable to the students and helpful.

Conclusion

In conclusion, teaching direct and indirect speech to students in high school is a challenging exercise especially when they are those who ESL learners. The influence on their native language to the rules of grammar translation is so huge such that the errors they do are so much. However, they can still be helped as there are ways in which the teacher can use to make the teaching helpful and effective.

References

Baker, W., & Bricker, R. H. (2010). The effects of direct and indirect speech acts on native English and ESL speakers’ perception of teacher written feedback  System ,  38 (1), 75-84.

Cook, G. (2010): Applied Linguistics, Oxford University Press.

Faltis, C., & Valdés, G. (2016). Preparing Teachers for Teaching in and Advocating for Linguistically Diverse Classrooms: A Vade Mecum for Teacher Educators. In Gitomer D. & Bell C. (Eds.),  Handbook of Research on Teaching  (pp. 549-592) Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1s474hg.13

McGrath, I. (2013).  Teaching materials and the roles of EFL/ESL teachers: Practice and theory . A&C Black.

Parmar N. J. (2014). An Introduction to Direct & Indirect Speech: International Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Regmi, D. R. (2009). Teaching reported speech:  Journal of NELTA ,  14 (1), 132-137.

Ri Kuk-Chol, Ri Sun-Yong (2017). An Error Analysis of Reported Speech Made by Korean Students: American Journal of Education and Information Technologies. Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 49-55. doi: 10.11648/j.ajeit.20170104.11

Robart, K. Quoted and Reported Speech. [E-article]. Accessed 3 December 2017 at www.sjsu.edu/.../QuitedandReportedSpeech.pdf

Smith, D. C. (2010). Teaching Reported Speech for Writing: A Game Approach: [E-article] Accessed 3 December 2017 http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Smith-ReportedSpeechGame.html

Whittle, E. (2016). The Question of Reported Speech: Identifying:  Uncorrected , 265.