'Verb subject agreement' tutor notes

The aim of the 'verb subject agreement' topic area is to revise the rules of making verbs agree with their subjects and to offer plenty of opportunities to learn by practice.

How does this tie in with the curriculums?

• England
  Rs/L1.1 - 'use implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge ... to predict meaning, try out plausible meanings and to read and check for sense.'
  Ws/L1.2 - 'understand that, while writing, a writer needs to keep checking that singular subjects have a singular verb and that plural subjects have a plural verb'
  
• Wales
  As England.
• Northern Ireland
  As England.
• Scotland
  See www.aloscotland.com for details of the Scottish curriculum.

In the Skillswise module you'll find:

Verb subject agreement - game
There are 3 levels to this game, getting progressively more difficult. At each level, learners are given the chance to hunt for treasure after they successfully complete each task.
At level 1 learners are asked to spot the subject of the sentence. At level 2 learners have to choose which form of the verb best fills the gap in the sentence (this covers some tense practice as well as verb-subject agreement). At level 3, the hardest level, learners are given a sentence and asked to re-type it using the new, given, subject. The sentence must be exactly right, with correct spelling and punctuation as well as correct verb subject agreement, to gain the chance to uncover the treasure.
If you have any comments at all on this game, please do get in touch.

Verb subject agreement - quiz
As usual, there are 3 levels of quiz, which get harder as you progress from level A to level C. At level A learners have to answer 'true' or 'false' to a number of statements about verbs and subjects. Levels B and C ask learners to decide which sentence is correct.
You might like to know that all the statements in level A are true. The tutor writing this material felt that it would be confusing to present students with statements that weren't true, as verb subject agreement is quite a confusing area. Let us know if you don't agree!

Students can print out a certificate if they score 50% or more in the quiz. This will appear as a link on the results page - click on the link and the certificate will appear in a new window. Once printed students can write their name on the certificate.

Verb subject agreement - factsheets
There are 3 factsheets in this section. They all give hints and tips and examples to help learners learn the rules of verb subject agreement.
The first factsheet looks at the basic rules. The second looks at some common things that can cause errors and confusion and the last factsheet looks at some specific problems to do with working out if something is singular or plural.

Verb subject agreement - worksheets
There are 4 worksheets in this section. The worksheets ask learners to choose which are the right forms of verbs within a number of sentences, to spot verb-form errors within an informative piece of text and to change singular verbs and nouns into plurals.
If you have a great worksheet for practising verb subject agreement - tell us about it!

Technical help:

To get the most out of this topic area you need the following 'plug-ins':

• Flash
  The game in this topic section uses Flash. This is free to download and should only take a few minutes. You can follow the BBC WebWise instructions to download it to your machine.
  Find out more.

If you don't have Flash the same learning points are covered in the quiz and in the worksheets and factsheets.
If you are new to the web, why not try the BBC WebWise online course, Becoming WebWise? It's free, you can do it in your own time from any computer and it will take you through everything you need to know to use the web successfully in your teaching.
Get WebWise.

You can find out more about the technical requirements for Skillswise in our Help - Technical Information section.

Taking it further:

Here's a few suggestions of other places on the web that you might find useful as resources that you can adapt for teaching verb subject agreement.

• Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University
  This American university website offers online guidelines for English language learning. This particular section of the website gives you several guidelines to help your subjects and verbs agree.
• Quiz from City University, Hong Kong
  This is a 22 question multiple-choice quiz aimed at learners of English as a foreign language. The learner has to choose the right form of the verb from a drop-down. They can then mark their own answers at the end.
• Quizzes galore!
  Multiple-choice quizzes where learners choose the right form of the verb. Again, they can mark their own answers at the end. This is a US site from Chicago public schools. The font is still small, but these are probably the best quizzes for level.
  Quiz 1 = overview / quiz 2 = 'I' / quiz 3 = 'you' / quiz 4 = 'he' / quiz 5 = 'we' / quiz 6 = 'they' / quiz 7 = various
• Wise-up to verb subject agreement
  More background information on the ins and outs of making verbs and subjects agree. Enjoy!

Please note that the BBC is not responsible for the content of other websites.

Do you know of any great online resources for practising verb subject agreement? Tell us about them!

Don't forget to visit Lesson plans and Teaching inspirations for more ideas for teaching verb subject agreement.