Abstract: Direct reaction, including elastic scattering, inelastic scattering and transfer reactions, is one of the commonly used methods to study the exotic structure of light neutron-rich nuclei. Taking for example the structure studies of ^6,8He, ¹¹Li, ^11,12Be, ^14,15B, and ^15,16C, this paper reviewed how to use these reactions to study the exotic structure of neutron-rich nuclei experimentally. The effective interactions (optical potential) between the halo nuclei ^6,8He/¹¹Be and the p/d targets are obtained by fitting the elastic scattering angular distributions. The deformation parameter of ¹⁶C is extracted from the inelastic scattering data of ¹⁶C+p/d, which indicates that the deformation of ¹⁶C can not be ignored. The p-, s- and d-wave intensities of the ground state in ⁸He and ^11,12Be are quantitatively studied by the single-nucleon transfer reaction. The results show that in the ground state of ⁸He, besides four valence neutrons filling the 0p_3/2 orbital, other configurations, such as (0p_3/2)²(0p_1/2)², may have some probability. The ground state of ¹²Be is dominated by the d-wave intruder, but its neighbour ¹¹Be is predominated by the s-wave intruder.