 Let's have a look now at some teaching ideas for reported speech. In this teaching idea, we'll have students going around asking their classmates for various bits of information. Of course the questions and the answers will be in direct speech. At the end of the activity, the key point here will be having the students report back the answers of what they previously got. In this situation, we have the question, find someone who is going away next weekend. Of course the question would have been in direct speech, as well as the answer. Now we'll report back the answer such as something like, Pablo told me that he was going to London next weekend. Here's another teaching idea for the reported speech, this time utilizing a series of Domino cards. The teacher will have cut out the cards before class to begin the activity. The teacher will distribute the cards to the students. Here each card is half direct speech and half reported speech with gaps. What we'll ask the students to do is match the direct speech to the reported speech and add in the critical bits of the sentence. If the card here says, I waited for you almost two hours, we'll ask the students to identify the right card. Here it would of course be this and they'll add in the bits that finish the sentence. She told me that she had waited quite a long time. The activity will continue so on and so forth until all of the cards are laid down. Here's an additional teaching idea for the reported speech, this time the activity will be done in two phases. The first phase will challenge the students to match a statement with a certain character in a picture. The students will see the statement, I can't see the board and have to assign it to the most logical person, probably being the short girl sitting behind the big man. They'll continue to match these statements with the correct caption and only then will we ask our students to report the speech using another card seen here. The idea here will be to challenge the students to A, remember what the students said and B, to report that statement in reported speech. So using the same example of the girl before pictured here as E, the students will be challenged to report her speech hopefully coming up with Helma said that she couldn't see the board. This will continue so on and so forth for each person in the picture.