Reported Speech Present Continuous Exercises

When reporting sentences in the present continuous, the helper verb am/is/are shifts to was/were, while the -ing form of the main verb stays exactly the same. "I am working" becomes "She said she was working." "They are playing football" becomes "He said they were playing football." The result is always the past continuous tense.

Negative forms follow the same pattern: "I am not sleeping" becomes "He said he wasn't sleeping." Pronouns change as they do in all reported speech — I becomes he/she and we becomes they. Time expressions also shift to reflect the past perspective: "now" becomes "then" or "at that moment," and "at the moment" becomes "at that moment." The key point to remember is that only the helper verb changes tense — the main verb keeps its -ing ending throughout the entire transformation. This makes present continuous one of the more predictable tenses to report, since you only need to focus on one word change.