🚪 Grammar B1-28: Indirect questions

The polite question machine, taught as a single move. Tess’s first morning in Edinburgh opens the material: Where is the bus station? is perfect English that lands like a demand, so a polite opener goes in front — and the grammar behind it does something strange. The question turns back into a statement: the inversion undoes itself, the verb steps behind its subject, and the helpers do, does and did pack up and leave, handing their tense to the main verb. A seven-row table runs the full range — wh-questions, yes / no questions that need if or whether, the perfect and the modals that stay put, and the end-mark rule: the question mark belongs to openers that really ask (Could you tell me…?, Do you know…?) and the full stop to openers that only report (I wonder…, I’d like to know…). A four-step procedure — find the question word or add if / whether, delete the helper and rescue its tense, subject before verb, end mark from the opener — is walked through three full worked runs, including a yes / no run and a thinking-aloud I wonder… run. The compare-and-verdict pair puts direct and indirect side by side as a matter of listener, not grammar: friends and emergencies take the direct question, strangers, teachers and phone calls take the wrapped one, and over-wrapping at your own breakfast table sounds like sarcasm. A tourist-information dialogue with ten tappable phrases shows openers, turned clauses and forgivably blunt direct questions working together. Practice runs to thirty-one explained multiple-choice items in four sets, twelve direct questions to sort by what their clause will need — if / whether against a surviving question word — six real learner errors to repair, and three traps: the kept helper, question order sneaking back inside the frame, and the end mark. Teacher notes give a 45-minute sequence, the door-on-the-board card move, the say-the-answer-first rescue, and Cambridge B1 Preliminary relevance.