Help your students develop confident and respectful communication skills with our Adapting Language for Different Audiences Worksheets! This engaging resource encourages students to reflect on how language and tone change depending on who they are speaking to and the situation. Through structured scenarios and open-ended reflection prompts, students practise adapting their speech to suit different audiences while building essential oral language and social awareness skills.

This worksheet set invites students to compare how they would express the same idea to different people - such as a teacher, friend, grandparent or sibling - using tone, word choice and sentence structure appropriate to the audience. The activities help students identify formal and informal communication styles, and recognise the importance of showing respect and clarity in spoken language.

Adapting Language for Different Audiences Worksheets are ideal for middle primary students and can be used during health, oral language, or writing units. The activities are designed to promote self-awareness, respectful communication and empathy, while also providing rich opportunities for classroom discussion and collaborative learning.

Key Learning Outcomes:

• ✅ Understand how language changes based on audience and context
• ✅ Use appropriate tone and vocabulary for formal and informal situations
• ✅ Practise respectful and effective oral communication
• ✅ Reflect on the purpose of communication and how relationships affect speech
• ✅ Develop social awareness and perspective-taking through language tasks

What’s Included:

• Scenarios with structured prompts for comparing different audiences
• Model sentences and guided spaces for student responses
• Reflection questions to deepen thinking about language choices
• Flexible layout suitable for individual or partner work

Materials Needed:

• Printed worksheets (single or double sided)
• Pencils or coloured markers for highlighting tone or speech types
• Optional: speech bubble cut-outs or comic strip templates

How to Use:

1. Read aloud the model sentence for each scenario and discuss the audience it might suit.
2. Students record how they would adapt the same message for different audiences (e.g. teacher, friend, sibling).
3. Discuss the differences as a class and highlight vocabulary or tone changes.
4. Use the reflection questions to encourage students to think about respectful and appropriate communication.

Ideas for Classroom Use:

• 💡 Use during health or wellbeing units to explore respectful relationships
• 💡 Include in writing lessons to support audience-focused writing tasks
• 💡 Pair students to practise reading their adapted sentences aloud
• 💡 Integrate with speaking and listening outcomes in oral language assessments
• 💡 Use as a warm-up before persuasive or narrative writing about point of view

Top Teacher Tips:

• 💛 Use role-play to model tone and facial expressions for each audience
• 💛 Display key vocabulary like audience, tone, polite, casual and respectful
• 💛 Provide scaffolded sentence starters for students needing extra support
• 💛 Differentiate by focusing on two audiences instead of four for younger learners

Adapting Language for Different Audiences Worksheets are a practical and engaging way to build language awareness, support social-emotional learning and help students understand how audience, purpose and tone work together in effective communication.