English Reported Speech Taught to Czech Native Speakers

Abstract

Being a teacher at the Faculty of Education at the University of Hradec Kralove (Czech Republic), the author refers to her own experience in training pre-service and in-service teachers of English. The main focus is placed on the issue of the English reported speech taught and learnt in the Czech educational environment. The issue is discussed with the reference to the courses in Pedagogical Grammar in which pre-service teachers of English discuss principles of the language and potentially effective ways of presenting these principles to learners of English. The research revealed that primary and secondary school teachers usually present English reported speech as a set of rules which are to be applied more or less automatically The paper presents findings which were made when the students were to reflect on some issues related to English indirect speech. These reflections focused on the clarity of explanations given in the teaching materials and on the linguistic explorations themselves. The research showed that deeper explorations of grammar issues and their presentations are welcomed by students majoring in teaching foreign languages. They realised how important it is to provide learners with clear inputs and how helpful it is to refer to the learners´ already acquired linguistic competences.

Keywords: Reported speech, language learning and teaching

Introduction

One of the courses offered to the students of the Faculty of Education of the University of Hradec Kralove (Czech Republic) who major in teaching English is called Pedagogical Grammar. Quite numerous people involved in teaching foreign languages have wondered about the contents of this course. Its objective is to train future English teachers in presenting and clarifying the grammar system of English in the Czech language environment. Within the framework of the course, the students, whose knowledge of English have reached at least the upper-intermediate level, are expected to reflect on their already acquired knowledge of the English grammar and to think about the best possible ways how to forward their knowledge when presenting grammar issues to their learners.

Courses in Pedagogical Grammar make pre-service teachers realise that they are in a quite specific position – they themselves are still studying the target language itself, so they are in the position of students, but they are also getting into the position of English teachers, so they need to more deeply explore the language system to be able to present it to their future students. The following point of view is definitely not the most recent one (it was expressed by Lewis, 1986, p. 18, i.e. more than thirty years ago), but it is still valid, and therefore presented to our pre-service teachers of English: “Teachers often feel that “explaining grammar“ is an important part of their job. Such a view must be a mistake – it is placing the emphasis on the teacher instead of the student. The teacher´s task is not to tell the student how the language works. Much more useful is for teachers to find good questions to ask students about examples, so that students may discover for themselves”.

The course of Pedagogical Grammar is not about memorizing rules and giving definitions. This course is about making the students explore the principles of the language. Through such explorations, a better understanding of not only the language rules and principles themselves, but also of the learning and teaching processes can be reached. As Batstone (1994, in Introduction) claims: The more we can find out about how grammar is learned and used, the better we will teach it effectively.

We try to make our pre-service teachers be creative, we make efforts to encourage them to discover the target language and simultaneously their mother tongue creatively because as Harmer (1994) says: “…discovery activities are so valuable since by asking students to discover ways in which language is used we help to raise awareness about the creative use of grammar – amongst other things” (p. 23).

Within the course, the students often work in groups, discuss possible ways of presenting varied grammar issues, make comments on their colleagues´ proposals, think about potentially problematic situations and expected failures, and they reflect on their own early teaching experience. The students are also guided to creative thinking about their own mistakes and mistakes made by others. Exploring the language through learning from mistakes is (maybe surprisingly) appreciated by our undergraduates. They realise that being aware of one´s own mistakes is a kind of prevention against making such mistakes furthermore, and being aware of others´ mistakes and of probable causes of these mistakes can result in a more effective way of teaching.

One of the aim of the courses in Pedagogical Grammar is to make our under-graduates aware of the fact which was nicely presented in the following way (Ur, 2009): “Learning more about language and about how language works is a useful, productive and interesting activity: increasing one’s awareness – being more ´alive´ to language - can bring considerable benefit, both personal and professional” (p. 5).

Problem Statement

Indirect speech is one of the issues which occur in more or less all course-books of English. This occurrence is absolutely logical since it reflects everyday language situations – we interpret someone else´s and/or our own opinions, statements, questions, etc. more or less every day, and so do all media. To be communicatively successful and to avoid potential and crucial misunderstandings and misinterpretations, we definitely need to interpret the really used direct speech properly.

In everyday communication, people usually do not care much about the perfect interpretation of the directly addressed speech, they do not care much about potential misunderstandings and misinterpretations caused by ignoring important rules. However, coming to the English teacher´s point of view, numerous problems, ambiguities and misunderstanding can appear during the process of the teaching input concerning the issue of indirect speech, which can result in inappropriate learning outputs and then in ineffective and/or problematic communication. Language teachers are (or at least should be) aware of the fact which is nicely expressed by Ur (2009): “There are rules which govern how words have to be manipulated and organized so as to express theses meaning: a competent speaker of the language will be able to apply these rules so as to convey his or her chosen meanings effectively and acceptably” (p. 3). Our objective is to train our undergraduate teachers to become not only highly competent speakers but also highly competent teachers – only in this case can they become such teachers who will make their future learners competent as well.

Nowadays, in the world of an increasing number of media of the most varied kinds, the frequency of cases when it is necessary to interpret other people´s opinions, media´s opinions and subsequently to interpret somebody or something already interpreted is enormously increasing. The necessity to interpret (or to report) in the correct way is therefore quite crucial. As it was already mentioned above, the reported speech is generally one of the linguistic issues which traditionally occur in foreign language course-books, and our pre-service teachers will definitely present this issue to their future learners. To educate and prepare them properly for their future professional career, we feel that is highly important to make our undergraduates realise how important the issue of the reported speech is in the current world.

Research Questions

Based on the purpose of our study, we decided to answer our main research question: Which are the most problematic issues of teaching and learning of English reported speech? Numerous “sub-questions” appeared in the process of finding the answers to the above mentioned main research question, and they were mainly related to the clarity of presentations and explanations given in the teaching materials used by learners of English. A vast majority of these teaching materials come from publishing institutions located in English speaking countries, so the issues are presented from native speakers´ points of view. Some explanations thus can be hardly understandable or confusing for learners whose mother tongue is completely different from English. On the other hand, there can be some issues occurring in reported speech which are shared by more languages, so the learners can use a positive transfer. That is why our main “sub-question” was: “Which phenomena existing in the Czech reported speech can be positively transferred when teaching and learning English reported speech?”.

Purpose of the Study

The main purpose of the study is to find ways how to improve the effectivity of teaching and learning English reported speech in the Czech educational environment. On the basis of her long-term professional career in training pre-service and in-service teachers of English in the Czech educational environment, the author can claim that the effectivity of teaching English grammatical issues improves if “conveniently chosen examples referring to the students´ already acquired knowledge are used, since the students are effectively motivated to constructively use their already existing linguistic abilities and skills“ (Ondrakova et al., 2019, p. 144).

We believe that already existing language abilities and skills are highly important in the process of learning other languages. Learners can use and further enlarge their language competences, which can even result in their improved linguistic creativity. At this point it seems convenient to quote Chomsky (as cited in Harmer, 1994): “It is competence that a child gradually acquires, and it is this language competence (or knowledge of the grammar rules) that allows children to be creative language users (e.g. experimenting and saying things they have never said before)” (p. 33). If teachers are competent and aware of their learners´ abilities and competences, then they are able to provide their learners with a kind of input which enables to train and develop their ability of creative performance. In that case we can say that the whole teaching process was effective.

Our findings made in 2016 (Tauchmanova, 2017), however, showed that “learners of more foreign languages are not sufficiently trained in thinking about their learning process, they are not fully aware of potentials of the positive transfer and of potentials of using and applying the already built language competences. This is definitely a challenge for foreign language teachers” (p. 2729).

Exploring the issue of English indirect speech with the objective to think about ways of clarifying this issue to Czech students of English can not only make our pre-service teachers more competent but it can also be motivating for the readers to further discover the issue and come up with improved clarifications or presentations of the appropriate rules. As Ur (2013) says: “it is helpful to have an explicit rule available for a grammar point being learnt, provided this is simple enough to be grasped by the learner” (p. 5).

Research Methods

The research was carried out during courses in Pedagogical Grammar of English, and it was qualitatively oriented. The students were referred to available linguistic, methodological, teaching and learning materials focused on the issue of the English indirect speech. Firstly, the quality of the students´ understanding of the issue itself and of the materials referred to was being revealed. Secondly, the level and quality of the students´ abilities to further discuss, interpret and clarify the presented findings were being examined.

The whole research process aimed to be formative. Within the framework of both the individual work and the group work the students were trained in revealing not only their own strong and weak points, but they could also learn from their teacher´s and their colleagues´ opinions, arguments, experience and also from their colleagues´ mistakes.

Findings

Being asked about problematic issues related to English indirect speech, pre-service English teachers usually cannot see a lot of them at first. The list is usually limited to “the necessity to change tenses”. However, the students start to become less confident when they are to answer subsequent questions like: ´Are the tenses changed every time?´, ´What else must or can be changed?´, ´Are there any changes that must be made when changing direct speech into indirect both in English and in Czech?´, etc. Pre-service teachers of English gradually come to the point that teaching and clarifying of English reported speech can be rather a problematic issue, and they come to realise that language teachers should be better aware of potential causes of mistakes made by their learners.

The following part of the paper deals with some findings which were made during courses in Pedagogical Grammar in which the students were to reflect on some issues related to English indirect speech. These reflections focused on the clarity of explanations given in the teaching materials and on the linguistic explorations themselves.

Conclusion

Since reported speech is a phenomenon often occurring in varied types of media, it definitely requires a more systematic attention in the process of training future English teachers. Our research was carried out within the course in Pedagogical Grammar which is offered to students majoring in teaching English. It revealed that primary and secondary school teachers usually present English reported speech as a set of rules which are to be applied more or less automatically, ignoring important nuances, which can result in ineffective communication.

The research showed that existing teaching and learning materials can be presented creatively with references to learners´ already existing knowledge and skills. Then, learners of English will be presented the issue of English reported speech in a more understandable way, clear inputs will make the necessary practice easier and the whole learning process will be more effective.

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