SENTENCES WITH INDIRECT REPORTED QUESTIONS IN STORY RETELLING IN ENGLISH

The article presents the results of a study that examined how Serbian undergraduate students of English reported questions in English in a story retelling task. Story retelling is a part of the first-year course Contemporary English Language 1 at the Department of English at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. It is used as a method of practising listening compre- hension, grammar, vocabulary and basic writing skills. Namely, the role of the EFL instructor is to read an English story of between 245 and 280 words to students twice, and students are required to memorise and retell the story in written form in accordance with grammatical rules and in a way that preserves textual cohesion and coherence. Students are explicitly instructed to use indirect reported speech in their stories since they are required to retell the stories from memory and referring to the notes they are allowed to take while the instructor is reading the story. The story includes three questions: a polite yes-no question, a rhetorical wh-question and an information-seeking wh-question. The corpus includes sentences with indirect questions from sixty-six retold stories and the analysis of the results demonstrates that the students report- ed the polite yes-no question and the information-seeking wh-question more successfully than the rhetorical wh-question.