Back to: English Language Primary 6
You are welcome to today’s class!!
We are excited to have you join our class!!
In today’s English class, we will be learning about Direct And Indirect Speech
From the word Direct and Indirect, you can take a guess as to what we are about to learn today.
When we talk about Direct, you should first imagine how you usually have conversations with your friends, including how you discuss interesting things.
By definition, Direct speech repeats, or quotes, the exact words spoken. When we use direct speech in writing, we place the words spoken between quotation marks (” “) and there is no change in these words. We may be reporting something that’s being said, or telling someone later about a previous conversation.
Come along as we look at some examples of Direct speech.
- My mother said, “What time will I be home?” and I answered, “I am not sure.”
Like our definition suggests, the direct speech in the example was written in quotation marks. This consists of both “What time will I be home” and “I am not sure.”
Let’s take another example:
- I said, “What is the noise all about?”
In this example we have only one direct speech which is “What is the noise all about?”
However, for Indirect Speech, you can imagine it to be the opposite of direct speech. For Indirect Speech, it is described as a reporter speech which is usually used to talk about the past. That way, we end up changing the tense.
Let’s take some examples of indirect speech.
- She said, “I saw him.” (direct speech) will change to:
- She said that she had seen him. (indirect speech)
From this example a direct speech was changed to indirect speech by changing the ‘saw’ to ‘seen.’
Another example is: She told him she was happy.
In both examples we did not have quotation marks because they are basically being reported.
Summarily, you can easily identify a direct speech through quotation marks, while an indirect speech is through the tenses in the sentence.
Evaluation
Identify how you can differentiate between a direct and indirect speech.
Reading Assignment
Cite five examples of a Direct Speech
Weekend Assignment
- What other name can you call an indirect speech?
- Using a telephone conversation between two friends, convert six direct speeches to indirect speeches.
We hope you enjoyed today’s class as always. In our next class, we will be learning new words alongside their meaning.
If you have any questions, kindly drop them in the comment section.
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