Learn Reported Speech easily with this video lesson

In this English lesson, you are going to learn the how to use Say, Tell, and the 3 Elements of Reported Speech.

Reported Speech is basically when you want or need to tell a different person or group what somebody else or another group of people said.

What often makes this a problem is the fact that the time, perspective, or maybe even the location of the speaker is now different, so we have to make some changes to what we are reporting to that other person.

You’re going to experience this based on a little story situation I’ve made for you. So, let’s start the story and then we’ll study it for the elements of reported speech afterwards.

If you prefer, you can watch the video below, or scroll past it to keep reading.

Watch the lesson on youtube!

Here’s the interaction between Tom and the Sales Assistant at the sporting goods shop. The dialogue is in Direct Speech. After studying the dialogue, we’ll turn it into Reported Speech on the other side.

Now, together, we are going to analyze the story of Tom at the Sporting Goods Store. The 2 things to unpack here are (number 1) how to turn Direct Speech into Reported Speech, and (number 2) to understand the differences in how to use Say and Tell when Reporting Speech.

The 3 Elements of Reported Speech

When Reporting someone’s Speech it is important that we clearly indicate who said what and make it clear for the listener. Therefore, there are a few things that we have to do to make everything clear and understood.

We need to add a reporting clause – He said, He told him that…, and similar starting phrases – in order to indicate who was speaking at the time.
The perspective of the dialogue or communication often changes, therefore we also need to change the pronouns from first and second person (depending on the situation) into the third person singular or plural.
And when Reporting Speech, we typically push the verb tense back to the past or future in the past from what was used in Direct Speech. We call this a backshift.

Allow me to explain these three concepts, and I will also demonstrate with some examples from the lead story.

1. the Reporting clause

A clause is a sentence fragment that connects to another sentence fragment to form a complete sentence. The most common type of clause connects the two pieces with THAT.

The Reporting Clause is just a starter clause for our Reported Speech. It indicates who was speaking, and uses a reporting verb like SAY or TELL. There are other more specific Reporting Verbs that indicate a few things about the speaker.

1. Reporting Verbs give the meaning or intention of the speaker.

2. Reporting Verbs also give meaning to the overall situation.

You can get a graphic that contains a list of the Reporting Verbs as part of your free study guide here.

The difference between say and tell

At this point, I’ll go ahead and explain the difference between Say and Tell from a grammatic perspective so that you know how to use these 2 Verbs correctly in Reported Speech.

You really can tell the difference between SAY and TELL grammatically, just by how they are constructed. Observe the following graphic and you can see for yourself.

As you can see from the graphic, once you isolate and remove all that’s the same about the 2 example sentences, what’s left is after TELL there is an object. After SAY, there is nothing.

We tell [somebody] [something] and we simply say [something].

However, the difference goes a bit deeper. TELL, is more specific and instructive. If the speaker was giving advice or making a suggestion, we are more likely to use TELL.

2. Perspective Shift

The second element of Reported Speech that you need to know is the idea of Perspective Shifts. At the time of the original dialogue that should be reported, that happened in the past.

By the time we get around to reporting that dialogue, any number of things might have changed, and we should reflect those changes when we report what’s been said.

1. The perspective of the speakers have shifted. And when talking about other people, we use a lot of pronouns to indicate who’s who in our communication. That means we need to shift any necessary pronouns so our audience can keep track of who said what. Here’s a graphic that shows the most common shifts of perspective from Personal Pronouns and Adjectives.

2. The second thing to remember about perspective shifts is the idea that time has passed between the time of the original conversation, and the reporting of that conversation. Have a look at some of the most common instances of Time Expressions and their shifts.

3. The last thing to keep in mind when reporting speech is that the location might often have shifted from the original conversation. For example: I might tell a student of mine that “I always keep a change of clothes here in my office.” He then goes and talks with someone else, somewhere else and reports – Jon said he always kept a change of clothes there in his office. In this example, the word HERE shifted to THERE. Have a look at the graphic that illustrates the most common location shifts.

3. Verb Tense Backshifts

The third element of Reported Speech is the idea of the Verb Tense Backshift. This shift helps us to put the verb tense in a grammatically correct form, and helps the listener understand the time perspective. There are 5 main areas to learn if you want to master Reported Speech. These are:

PRESENT TENSES
PAST TENSES
MODAL VERBS (FUTURE IN THE PAST)
IMPERATIVES
QUESTIONS

When it comes to tenses, reporting the speech just shifts it back one level. For example, the Present Simple shifts back to the Past Simple. Or the Present Perfect shifts back to the Past Perfect. I’ve put together a set of tables that are full of examples and included them in your free study guide.

Apart from tenses, we also need to know how to shift from Imperative (commands) to Infinitives (think Shakespeare’s “to be or not to be”). For example, the teacher said “Pay attention in class,” reports as: The teacher told me to pay attention in class.

The final element of Backshift is really about the tense AND a change into how we report questions. Questions are reported as indirect speech. There are 2 kinds of questions we should be aware of and how they are changed.

1. Yes/No Questions

2. Wh-Questions

Yes/No Questions are reported by replacing the Auxiliary Verb that started the question with IF as the link to both clauses.

When it comes to Wh-Questions, we keep the question word and report the sentence as a Relative Clause. You can see examples of both in the graphic below.

Round Up

Now, let’s go back to our original lead story and turn that dialogue into Reported Speech shall we?

Final Word

Reported Speech is an important but difficult element of communicating in English. It requires a lot of practice in order to master. I hope this post helped to explain everything for you in a clear and visual way for you to understand. Of course, if you need a refresher, you can always come back here and read through again, or watch my YouTube lesson on this very topic.

I also recommend you get yourself a good exercise book so that you can practice the grammar on your own. The book I often use with my Business English students is Grammar for Business, and it has some excellent exercises on Reported Speech, as well as most of the other important grammar elements. And it was made with for adult learners with an emphasis on business.

And don’t forget to download your free study guide PDF on Reported Speech here. It is a collection of my diagrams on this topics with the explanations labeled into the diagrams. It is a visual teaching aid that I’ve made just for you. You can grab that here.

If learning English is your passion, you want to be a part of my community, I’ve got a Facebook Group called Graphic English. It’s made for Visual Learners, and I post diagrams and photos there to teach you English Vocabulary, Grammar, Idioms, and Phrasal Verbs visually. You can find it here.

How to use Say, Tell, and Reported Speech

Watch the lesson on youtube!