Yet Another 15 Games for Reported Speech

1. Reporting the whole course
Students report something someone in the class (including the teacher) said, and the other students try to guess or remember who said it. This is nice near the end of a course or as part of a revision lesson.

2. Tell on his errors
Students watch a segment of a video where a character makes stupid verbal blunders, e.g. the Rowan Atkinson priest character in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and listen for things they shouldn’t have said. When you stop the video they get one point for each mistake they report but lose one point if the thing they report was actually what the person meant to say/ should have said.

3. We’ve heard that story before
Students write a story and add one of the events (e.g. the vase getting broken) a second time where it shouldn’t be. When they change groups their new partner has to listen carefully to the story and report anything they hear repeated with phrases like “But you said you had already shot him dead before the police arrived”. With less creative classes or to save time, this activity can also be done with them being given the stories but adding the repeated parts themselves.

4. It’s my story, I’ll mix it up if I want to
Students work together to put a worksheet of pictures or words in some order to make a story, but without writing anything down to remind them what the story was and the order they put the pictures or words in. They then split up to tell their story separately to another pair of students. The two pairs of students then get together, and the people who were told the story try to find differences between the two versions, and report them to the storytellers.

5. Report him for that topic
Students report speech they heard in their lives, heard in a previous jigsaw listening or video stage, or have been given quotes from on a worksheet, and their partners guess what subject was being talked about.

6. Report that man!
Students report something that was said, e.g. quotes by famous people they all know or that they have been given, and they guess who said it (maybe from a list of possible people).

7. Report them and rank them
Students are given different lists of quotes and have to agree on a ranking of all of them in terms of how true they are, how funny they are, how inspirational they are etc.

8. Guess what they said about it
Report the topic and the person speaking and students guess if what was said was positive or negative, and be more specific about the opinions if they can. This works both for things famous people said and things they really heard in their own lives.

9. Report, analyse and report
One student reports another student’s answers to a questionnaire, and the third student analyses their personality, most suitable blind date, most suitable job etc- either from an analysis they have been given or from their own imagination. The second person can then report the third person’s judgements back to the first person to see whether they think the conclusions are true or not.

10. Accumulating mingle
As students walk around class doing a mingle activity such as “Find Someone Who”, they have to not only find out about the person they are speaking to but also everything their partner has found out so far. This continues until they know one thing about each person in the class or have answered all the questions on their worksheet, at which point they can sit down.

11. Reporting stereotypes
Students guess which nationality is talking about which nationality, with sentences from the teacher’s experience, from questionnaires that have been used in several countries (these come up in the news sometimes), or from the other students’ imaginations about what the British think about Americans etc.

12. Guess the it
Students report a sentence with a reference word like “it”, “that”, “him” or “one” in it, then the other students guess what it refers to. This can be done with jigsaw videos and listenings, as explained in the previous article on reported speech games.

13. Tell me more tell me more
Students report something that someone said but leave out some crucial information at the end, e.g. “Brad Pitt said that Jennifer Aniston was terrible at…”, and the other students try to guess the missing words, being given hints if needed.

14. Match that grammar
Write some sentences in both reported and direct speech and split them down the middle. Put the first halves of the reported speech versions on the Student A worksheet and the end halves of the direct speech sentences on the Student B worksheet, but mixed up. Students try to work out which sentences match and to write the complete sentences in both direct and reported speech on their worksheet (obviously not showing their worksheet to their partner until the end of the activity).

15. Guess the gossip
Students make gossip sentences with “Yesterday I heard that…” etc, maybe from cue cards like “Michael Jackson” or “two-timing, then the other students guess if they really heard that from elsewhere or just made it up on the spot. This can be used for love vocab, business vocab, crime vocab, education, politics etc.